How gross is it to wear the same jeans day in and day out,
without washing them for over a year? It’s actually not so bad,
says University of Alberta student Josh Le. And, as it turns
out, not so unhealthy, either. After 15 months and one week of
wearing his raw denim jeans, Le thought it was time to wash
them. Just for fun, he and one of his University of Alberta
professors, Rachel McQueen, turned it into an informal
scientific experiment, taking bacterial counts from the pants,
then tossing them into the washer, and doing the same thing
again a couple of weeks later. Aside from the psychological yuk
factor, the bacteria load on the jeans was surprisingly
harmless. Though the bacterial count was high, the strains found
were not a threat to human health, said McQueen, a professor of
textile science in the Department of Human Ecology. “I expected
to find some bacteria associated with the lower intestine such
as E. coli, but was surprised to find there weren’t any, just
lots of normal skin bacteria,” said McQue