Americans Neglect to Wash Their Hands

There's a good chance it's fecal matter: study

(NEWSER) - If you’re reading this on your smartphone, you might want to go wash your hands now: A new study out of London finds that one out of six cellphones has fecal matter on it. UK researchers swabbed 390 mobile phones and the British hands that used them, and found that 16% of both were contaminated with E. coli bacteria—which, yes, comes from poop, Time reports. More»

11% of adults are dirty liars about hand-washing

(NEWSER) - The good news: 96% of adults claim they always wash their hands in public restrooms, according to a phone survey. The bad news: only 85% of adults actually do, a new observational study finds. Despite the dirty people who are lying about their hygiene habits (and, perhaps, sharing a bread basket with you at dinner), the number of hand-washers is the highest it's been since 1996 when the study started, USA Today reports. More»

(AP) - Wash your hands, folks, especially you ladies. A new study found that women have a greater variety of bacteria on their hands than men do. And everybody has more types of bacteria than the researchers expected to find. "One thing that really is astonishing is the variability between individuals, and also between hands on the same individual," said University of Colorado biochemistry assistant professor Rob Knight, a co-author of the paper. More»

Public health uproar ensues after prank video goes online

(NEWSER) - Diners in Ohio are feeling queasy after an internet video surfaced yesterday showing a young man taking a bath in a local Burger King’s sink. In the video, employees and a store manager watch a heavily tattooed “Mr. Unstable” relax in a bubble bath. Burger King reps tell WDTN of Dayton the employees involved have been fired and the sink sanitized—twice. More»

Enough navel-gazing; looking lower will yield clues into your inner workings

(NEWSER) - Poop isn't just joke fodder, Leslie Crawford writes in Salon, it can also be a vital way to assess your health and well-being, and Americans are being prompted to scrutinize (and rhapsodize over) what they produce in a variety of media. From Oprah to the popular book What's Your Poo Telling You?, the virtues of a good bowel movement might never have been more widely extolled. More»