If you’re the type of traveler who diligently packs your hand sanitizer everywhere you go, along with wipes to clean your airplane tray table, soap for your hotel bathroom counter, and checks every nook and cranny for bed bugs, then you may want to avert your eyes. Because it turns out there’s one more gross place you’re probably not sanitizing when you travel.
In February, JRPass.com, the Japan Rail Pass provider, released the findings of its study, which aimed to uncover the dirtiest travel items we all pack for every trip. As the brand explained, it ran a petri-dish microbial culture experiment using” nutrient agar (a food gel for growing bacteria and fungi) to identify which travel items carry the highest levels of bacteria when brought back into the home.”
It collected samples from six commonly used travel items, including samples from airport clothing, mobile phones, hand luggage, shoes, hold luggage, and passports. They even tested three individual items from each category to ensure consistency.
After conducting the experiment, the team came to a surprising conclusion: Your passport is actually the nastiest thing you travel with on your journeys across the globe.
Specifically, the experiment measured colony-forming units, or CFUs, which is essentially a way scientists count how much bacteria is growing on the surface of an object. The higher the number of CFUs, the more microbial activity is detected.
Passports clocked in at 436 CFU per three square meters, which may not seem like a big deal, until you learn that the next closest item, checked luggage, had just 97. Shoes came in thired with 65, followed by followed at 65, then hand luggage at 56, phones at 45, and coats last with 15.
What’s important to remember is that these numbers don’t automatically mean your passport, or anything else you travel with, is dangerous, but it does suggest that you may want to be wiping down your passport more than you think.
“Our hands are well known to be very well colonised by the bacteria and fungi (and some viruses) that normally live there,” Dr. Primrose Freestone, an associate professor in clinical microbiology at the University of Leicester, said. “This means that, as well as our resident hand skin microbiome, our hands will, when they touch any surface, pick up additional microbes present within the airport environment, which have the microbial deposits from the thousands of people who pass through each day.” As Freestone added, the greater the handling of a passport by different people’s hands, the greater the variety of bacteria, fungi, and even viruses.
As for what you can do, Freestone said it’s important to clean high-touch personal items like phones and passports using antibacterial or alcohol wipes, taking off your travel shoes before entering a new place, and changing out of your plane clothes as quickly as possible, as well as wiping down luggage when you get home. But, her most important of all is a classic: Wash your hands.
“Airports and public transport are high-contact environments, meaning hands easily pick up microbes from surfaces like check-in kiosks, handrails, and luggage,” Freestone said. “Washing hands thoroughly with soap and water, or using an alcohol-based gel, is one of the simplest and most effective ways to reduce potential exposure.”
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