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Don't touch that gas pump! They're the germiest.
If you ask me, the germiest places in America are kids’ play areas at fast food joints. But according to a new study I’ve got it wrong. It’s gas pumps!
A survey conducted by a University of Arizona researcher and Kimberly-Clark Professional found 71% of gas pump handles were teeming with germs “most associated with a high risk of illness,” per USA Today. Ewww.
Which other seven places were found to be highly contaminated? Continue reading »
Tunnel of fun?
Dream vacation? Hardly. But Arizona mom Erin Carr-Jordan is on a mission. Carr-Jordan has planned her family’s cross-country summer vacation around stops at McDonald’s and Chuck E. Cheese’s and Burger King and other fast-food joints with children’s play areas. She’s not out to recapture the joy of climbing through plastic tunnels and burying herself in a pool of plastic balls. Rather, she wants to find out how nasty these places are.
So far? Pretty nasty. Continue reading »
You've got more than just groceries in your cart
When I pop my two-year-old in the front of a shopping cart at the grocery store I do feel a little squeamish. I’m also known to run slightly anxious in this way, though — with personal rules like never make skin contact with hotel duvets.
But a study by researchers at the University of Arizona now tells me that my germ-a-phob radar is spot on: the scientists took swabs from store carts in four states and found that 72 percent had a marker for fecal bacteria. E-coli was found on 50 percent of the carts, along with a host of other bugs.
As msnbc reported, “That’s more than you find in a supermarket’s restroom,” according to Charles Gerba, the lead researcher on the study and a professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona. “That’s because they use disinfecting cleaners in the restrooms. Nobody routinely cleans and disinfects shopping carts.”
And kids who ride in carts have been found to get sick more often with bacteria like salmonella and campylobacter.
So is this something we should worry about? Besides the yuck factor, are our little shopping cart riders at risk? Continue reading »
Daycare Germs May Be a Good Thing
It’s generally assumed that kids in daycare get sick more than other kids their age. A new study confirms the anecdotal evidence, but it also shows that all of those germs may help build up immunity against future colds and infections.
The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found a higher illness rate predominantly in children who are placed before age 2-1/2 in child-care centers with relatively large groups of 8 to 12 children. Compared with children who were at home, these kids had more respiratory and ear inflections during early preschool and the same risk of infection between ages 3-1/2 and 4-1/2, based on the eight-year study of 1,238 families with newborns in 1998. But here’s the catch: these kids also had lower rates of infection between ages 5 and 8.
The research “provides reassuring evidence for parents that their choices regarding child care shouldn’t have a major effect” on their kids’ long-term health, says Sylvana M. Cote of Ste-Justine Hospital and the University of Montreal, Quebec., who led the study. Continue reading »
My firstborn never ate anything off the floor, always stopping to point at it first, raising her eyebrows at me in a look that said, “Hey Mom? Step it up. I could have swallowed this!”
My mom always told me to be ready for my next baby, because that kind of early warning system just wasn’t normal. Sure enough, I spent the first year and a half of my second daughter’s life lurching around shouting, “NO! Don’t eat that!”
I’m sure the sum total of the things they both ingested in those early years would keep me up at night if I thought about it. But I don’t. After all, dirt’s supposed to be good for the immune system, right?
One mom, recently published in the New York Times Social Q’s hasn’t figured that out yet. Her young son, like most babies, eats pretty much anything he finds on the floor, which is why she doesn’t allow shoes in the house. But she’s also considering banning friends who shed skin and hair (which is pretty much all of them) after a visit with an itchy friend:
Have you been slathering yourself and your kids in hand sanitizer this winter? Most of us have. Those little bottles of alcohol-based gel have become ubiquitous. We find them at the grocery store where we go to grab a cart, at the movie theater when we go to grab a seat, near the doorway of any shopping center and installed in every classroom. In all, three quarters of Americans use six or more germ-killing products every day.
There’s good news for those of us who’ve been rolling our eyes at all the literal hand-wringing we’re expected to do over germs these days. According to a new article in Slate, all those products don’t work to stop the spread of colds and flus.
Although the swine flu may very well be a popular costume this year, that’s the only kind you want to let in your door. To help prevent the other kind — the contagious, potentially serious kind — from replacing tummyaches as the aftermath of Halloween trick-or-treating, experts are offering some tips for staying safe and healthy this year. Naturally, if you or your kids are not feeling well, you probably want to stay home and not pass out candy — you don’t want to pass out germs along with the goodies.
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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