How Often Should I Clean My Phone?

The world is a giant petri dish. You and everything you come into contact with are carpeted with bacteria—so there’s no escaping microorganisms. The good news is that the vast majority of them are either benign or beneficial. That’s true even of those infamous “fecal bacteria.” While a sick person’s excrement harbors illness-causing germs, a healthy person’s poop—though gross—usually isn’t dangerous. (If you’ve read anything about fecal transplants, you know that the bacteria in feces may in some cases confer health benefits.) So even if your smartphone is enveloped in an invisible aura of bacteria—and it surely is—most of those bacteria pose no threat to you. “It’s unusual that the general bacteria healthy people leave on surfaces like our phones will make us sick,” says Emily Toth Martin, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan. That said, germs that can sicken you are out there. And because many of us touch our phones while we eat meals, extra caution is warranted when it comes to these devices. Illness-causing germs—including the types that cause food poisoning, common colds and other infections—can only make you sick if they enter your body, says Philip Tierno, a clinical professor of microbiology and pathology at New York University’s Langone School of Medicine. They tend to do that by clinging to your hands and then sloughing o...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime public health Source Type: news