Do you ever think about the things you touch every day? What about the door handles inside the restroom? The phone at your desk? The remote control in a hotel room? Care to guess how many germs you come in contact with every day.
Joel Winders with Pollock Packaging says the stuff you touch may be some of the dirtiest places on earth.
"This surface may look clean, but I can measure it, and you may be surprised how high the number can be," Winders said.
He has a machine called the Clean-Trace Test that is used to conduct hygiene tests at hospitals and schools.
Winders explains, "When you get above 200 that's a measure of concern. Typically in our world, if you can stay below 20, then that is the pass zone."
Swabbing a random work phone - he placed it in the machines and surprise: "It's over 1100! That's pretty bad."
So other office items were swabbed. The vending machine? 556. Coffee pot? 525.
It seems the top offenders in public places included a drive-thru ATM at a bank at a whopping 1,032.
What was really surprising is a public toilet that came in at only 431. The dirtiest thing tested in this round of germy places was a gas pump, which nearly hit the 2,000 mark, with a 1,907.
You may want to use hand sanitizer next time you fill up. By the way, doing that can drop the germs on your hands from the 1,100 mark all the way down to 90.
Some of the other interesting places with high germ numbers of 300 or higher?
71 percent of Gas Pump Handles
68 percent of Mailbox Handles
43 percent of Escalator Rails
41 percent of ATM Buttons
40 percent of Parking Meters/Kiosks
35 percent of Crosswalk Buttons
35 percent of Vending Machine Buttons
