Think of all the dirtiest places you visit per week....do you ever wonder how clean the places you go are? You have a right to be worried. I thought I would go through the top 10 places that you should be leery of, one per blog post:
#1. Public Toilets....most public toilets are dirty. Contrary to what your mother taught you, germs typically do not enter the skin on your rear from a toilet seat but who wants to sit on them anyway? I know my mother taught me to use either the seat covers or drape toilet paper around the seat, then squat, hover, and don't touch. Even this doesn't protect you from the germs lurking in the restrooms. Germs do enter our body through the nose, eyes, and mouth, and are usually transmitted from our own contaminated hands and fingers. Want to know where those germs are? The faucet handle in most bathrooms have 400 times more germs than the toilet seat. Other places: the toilet seat, the floor, the door handles, the toilet flusher handle, the sink, etc. Every time you flush that toilet, it splashes contaminated water everywhere. Watch your fellow restroom person. Do they wash their hands? With soap and water? Do they wash their fingertips? Statistics show that only 1 in 4 people will wash their hands after they go to the restroom. And only 1 in 100 will use a paper towel to open the restroom door after they just washed their hands. Those of you who washed and then opened the door with your clean hands: you just picked up nice wee buggies who are just waiting for you to blow your nose, put your hands to food and eat those germs. And those same statistics show it isn't children who are doing it. It is grown adults. Beware of kissing a woman after she's been to the restroom. She has usually freshened her makeup after using the facilities and transferred those germs to her makeup and lipstick. I actually did a study once on how many of my patients washed their hands after they went to the bathroom. I numbered the trifold towels. One day I put in a pretty feminine smelling soap and another day a masculine soap then measured how much was left vs how many went to the bathroom that day. I was shocked at the results. Out of the 20 patients who used the bathroom, only 5 trifold towels were used, and only 3 squirts of soap were used of the feminine soap but 5 squirts were used for the masculine soap. You would think there were more males than females, right? Nope. All females.
So what should you do? Line that toilet seat. Hovering is ok if you can do it but recognize that falling off balance and grabbing the seat or the wall is the worst thing you can do. Take toilet tissue and open the stall door. Then throw it in the toilet. Go to the sink and with plenty of soap and running water, lather up well and rinse well. Use paper towels to shut off the water, more to dry and keep one to open the restroom door. Discard the paper towel in the garbage usually placed right outside of the restroom doors. Be careful of your purse. Don't set it down on the floor or on the back of the toilet. Hang it on the hook and hook it on your arm when washing your hands. Never ever set it down!
