5 germiest things you come into contact with every day

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Have you ever broken out in spots randomly just on one side of your face (and then assumed it was a dirty pillowcase)? We are here to tell you that the culprit is most likely your phone. Not to be gross, but one in six mobile phones are actually contaminated by fecal matter—yes, that’s poop, to put it in layman terms. E. coli, the bacteria that causes stomach cramps, diarrhea, and UTIs, can live for hours on warm surfaces like your phone. Our favourite electronic devices that rarely leave our hands have been proven to sometimes even be dirtier than your toilet seat! If you have not already, please get into the habit of disinfecting your phone every day.

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This kitchen essential is infamous for harbouring bacteria. Experts have found cutting and chopping surfaces to contain 50 to 200 times as much bacteria as an average toilet—think about that the next time you’re laying out your food on it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using plastic or wood varieties—the fact is that every time you drag a cutting implement across its surface, your chopping board gains a little groove that raw food particles and germs will get into, and that is not easy to clean out.

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Let’s face it, almost everyone who sits with a keyboard all day spends their time trailing smudgy fingers across it, eating lunch and snacks over it, sneezing over it, and occasionally even spilling drinks on it. If you’re working from home, your cat will likely have hopped on for a snooze after coming out of their litter box. Apart from a half-hearted brush when a couple of the keys start sticking, most keyboards don’t get cleaned either. Clean your keyboard starting from this week; simply give it a good shake upside down to get any crumbly bits out, then wipe down each key, as well as the gaps in between.

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Ladies and germs, we have a winner! Continually hailed as the dirtiest item in the entire house, kitchen sponges can contain as many as 10 million bacteria per square inch—that’s about 200,000 times more than an average toilet seat! And no wonder; it’s wet and consistently has food particles trapped within its fibres. Isn’t it ironic that the very thing you use to clean stuff with actually needs more cleaning itself? A whopping 75 percent of kitchen sponges have been found to be absolutely crawling with coliform bacteria, a family which includes salmonella and E. coli, amongst other nasty bugs.

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This one is particularly prescient during the coronavirus pandemic. We all know that the first thing to do when we get home is to wash our hands immediately, but have you stopped to consider that you’ll have first switched on the lights before you even got round to washing up? Now, every time you turn that light on or off, you’re making contact with potential bacteria brought in from outside, rendering your hand-washing kind of pointless. Even pre-COVID, light switches are routinely an overlooked part of the house when cleaning. Put this on your cleaning list, stat.