Doo Doo Does Fly!

A while ago, I posted about my curiosity relating to the belief that reading on the toilet and keeping periodicals close to the toilet is a danger to our health due to flying microscopic particles of feces. Yesterday, I caught the end of an episode of MythBusters, and the two ambiguously straight hosts were busting this very myth. They teamed up with a microbiologist from UCSF to test a set of toothbrushes that were kept in the bathroom, about 6 or 7 feet away from the toilet. Another set of toothbrushes was kept in an closed container in the kitchen. The microbiologist incubated both samples overnight to reveal bacteria, and she found that BOTH sets of toothbrushes contained fecal coliform! It didn’t matter the distance from the toilet, because bacteria travels readily through various means, including magic, and is a virtually unavoidable part of daily living. At low levels, fecal coliform bacteria is harmless. Now that I know this, I feel a lot less guilty about using my girlfriends’ toothbrush to clean our toilet.