Are you in charge of a restaurant, a hotel, an office building, a theater, a taxi or public transportation service or anywhere people frequent? Do any of your businesses have public seating? Yes and yes? Then what ever you do, DON’T stop reading …
Investigative journalists from “Good Morning America” have completed a comprehensive study that you really must learn more about. As part of this study, researchers went from coast to coast testing any and all public seats they came across (e.g. seats and benches in taxis, airport hangers, airplanes, rental cars, restaurants, hotel lobbies and rooms, movie theaters, parks and of course bathrooms.)
It’s probably not a surprise to many that bacteria and germs were found on nearly everything tested.
“When you have 350,000 tushes on these seats, it’s going to get a little bit of bacteria on them, you know?” said Linton Johnson, a spokesman Bay Area Rapid Transit commuter train seats in San Francisco (one of the places tested). Well, Mr. Johnson is correct in this assumption.
Here’s a brief rundown of what the “GMA” study found:
Nearly 28 percent of all seats tested contained traces of E. coli and more than half showed traces of fecal matter.
Those containing the least amount of germs and less of the kinds of bacteria are very harmful or potentially fatal were seats found in personal car, public taxis, restaurants, hotels (lobbies and rooms) and surprisingly bathrooms.
Though these seats harbored millions of yucky germs, they paled in comparison of seats found in movie theaters, airplanes, airport lounges, rental cars and public parks. The seats in these places contained ridiculously high E Coli and fecal matter counts. For example, rental car seats revealed hundreds (yes, hundreds) of E. coli colonies and super dangerous staph viruses were found to be rampant on a movie theater seats. Also, though almost every airplane seat contained traces of fecal matter, E. coli, and somewhat oddly, yeast, the seats and benches in airport lobbies contained the highest amounts of all these nasty germs.
“There were so many organisms on these seats that I would say that they were never cleaned or rarely cleaned, and that is something to be reckoned with,” said Dr. Philip Tierno, New York University’s director of microbiology and immunology and the person responsible for conducting the contamination tests for this study.
Making sure you’re not responsible for spreading this nastiness comes down to one thing: your cleaning service. Can you trust yours?