DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Via Magazine asks, How clean is your hotel room? The answer may disturb you:

Chuck Gerba, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Arizona, conducted a study of hotel cleanliness. The results? Well, let’s just say that bacteria you’d expect to find in the toilet often turned up on the TV remote control.

Gerba has a knack for soundbites. Here’s another one that’s relevant to hotel-room cleanliness, from a Salon article contradicting advice from Self magazine that women shouldn’t sit on public toilets to pee:

“If you have a choice between licking a cutting board or a toilet seat,” concludes Gerba, “pick the toilet seat.”

I’ve had mixed feelings about writing this article. On the one hand, as Michael Moore illustrated in Bowling for Columbine, US media frequently publish fear-mongering stories, presumably because sensational headlines intimating risk generate high-volume sales.

On the other hand, I don’t get sick very often, but about half the time that I do it’s just after returning from hotel stays and airplane trips. I’m quite sure I’ve handled hotel-room doorknobs, toilet levers, and TV remote controls and then touched my food or face or eyes. The thought makes me shudder. I don’t want to live in fear… but I don’t want some hairy truck-driver’s crotch germs on my hands, either.

The fact that Chuck Gerba travels with disinfecting wipes tells me I have something to worry about. But then again, the fact that the Clorox Disinfecting Wipes website quotes Gerba in a half-dozen studies designed to prove that the Clorox product is a requirement for keeping healthy in this germ-ridden world tells me that Gerba’s research may have been promoted past its actual value. I’m interested in what an expert in microbial science has to say… unless he’s on the payroll of a company that profits from my belief in his research.

But I guess I have more issues with trust than I do with bacteria.