You, like nearly everyone else on this planet, are likely glued to your phone all day every day, receiving calls, sending texts, surfacing the web, and maybe even playing Angry Birds. So keeping in mind how many times a day you touch your phone, it really should come as no surprise that your phone not only contains personal contacts, but lots of bacteria as well.
A group of students from the University of Surrey decided to test just how germ-infested their cellular devices were by dipping them into Petri dishes. The end result was not pretty.
Thankfully, while the majority of the bacteria were harmless, certain disease-carrying bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus were found on the surface (mostly near the "home" button).
"The ecological niche on the body for Staphylococcus aureus is the nostrils, so a furtive pock of the nose, and quick text after, and you end up with this pathogen on your smartphone," Dr. Simon Park, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology, who led the students in their study, said in a statement.
Another bacterium found was Bacillus mycoides, which is naturally found in soil.
"We know that this phone or its user had recently been in contact with soil," Park explained. "Each phone tells a story."
But our phones don't just harbor our own germs, but bacteria that we've picked up from other people or the world around us.
Bacteria use all sorts of things as vectors in order to spread their transmission - for example, insects, water, food, coughs and sneezes, sexual contact and rain. And now, mobile phones can be added to the list.
"From these results," Park concluded, "it seems that the mobile phone doesn't just remember telephone numbers, but also harbors a history of our personal and physical contacts such as other people, soil and other matter."
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