WebMD Medical News Laura J. Martin, MD Oct. 21, 2011 -- Frequent
hand washing will keep those nasty bugs at bay, right? Not if
you’re using a public bathroom. Paper dispensers, hand dryers,
door handles -- all the things you touch after scrubbing -- are
contaminated with all sorts of menacing microbes, sometimes too
many to count. "We documented extensive bacterial contamination
of high‐touch environmental sites in 22 public restrooms and
aircraft," says researcher Lennox Archibald, MD, PhD, of the
College of Medicine, University of Florida, in Gainesville.
Translation: Bathrooms in restaurants, resorts, hospitals, and
even libraries are crawling with bugs that can cause everything
from diarrhea to wound infections. "You can go paranoid thinking
about it," Archibald tells WebMD. There's been virtually no
research into how many bacteria, and how many different types of
bacteria, lie in wait in public restrooms, he says. So from
December 2010 through February 2011, his team descended on
restrooms inside four co