While public restrooms are introduced to a litany of bacteria from the humans that use them, the grimy restroom stalls are unlikely to pose any real danger to your health, according to an article in Live Science.
Here four things to know about public restrooms and bacteria:
1. While people bring an extraordinary amount of bacteria into public restrooms, most harmful bacteria can't exist long on cold, barren bathroom surfaces. A healthy immune system and good hand hygiene practices will most likely protect bathroom users from the rest of the harmful organisms. "The restroom isn't that dangerous," Jack Gilbert, PhD, a microbiologist at Argonne (Ill.) National Laboratory and co-author of a study examining the microbiome of restrooms, told Live Science. "The organisms which can grow there have a very low probability of being able to cause an infection."
2. Modern hygiene practices and vaccination have significantly reduced the chance of coming into contact with dangerous pathogens in public restrooms. Theoretically, a virus like hepatitis A could be transmitted through fecal material in a bathroom, but the chances of such a transmission are low because most people in the U.S. are vaccinated for hepatitis A when they are one year old.
3. While studies have suggested that flushing a lidless toilet can spread potentially infectious bacteria through the air, there are no confirmed instances of an infectious disease being transmitted in this manner.
4. Dr. Gilbert told Live Science, "The only places we see significant transference of illness on a regular basis, we believe, are healthcare environments, because people in that environment have had their immunity stripped away." Dr. Gilbert went on to state that healthy people have little to fear from public restrooms. "There's no evidence to support that conclusion at all...our obsession with overt sterilization and cleanliness, our paranoia, is just not helpful," he said.