Whilst you may FEEL more comfortable swiping through some holiday slaps on your mates iPhone’s than getting your hands too close to your mate’s downstairs toilet seat… some new research has revealed that the latter may actually be a far more hygienic pastime, if not quite as good for beachwear shots…

‘Initial Washroom Hygiene’, whose business it is to know about these things, has found that our interactions with our smartphones during visits to the Smallest Room in the House might be cause for some concern… because we handle our devices before AND after washing our hands, bacteria have found the perfect safe haven to stowaway out into the world and not down the bathroom sinkhole…

The results of Initial’s research indicate that while the average toilet seat has 220 bacterial ‘hotspots’ (I guess we can assume they’re like colonies of the little beasties)  the average smartphone comes in with a whopping 1479!

Yes, that’s correct… the average smartphone is SEVEN TIMES dirtier than your average toilet seat!

Joy!

Apparently, leather cases are the worst, while rubber also provides a wonderfully porous warm haven in which to multiply in the gentle glow of your phone’s low level wifi, bluetooth and 4G radiation!

More Joy!

(’tis the season, after all.)

The silver lining on this rather mucky cloud of bacterial bad news is that the vast majority of critters breeding and hanging out in your phone case are YOUR OWN – so the chances of making yourself sick from it are slim.  As is the silver lining, because just because YOUR phone is unlikely to deliver you a dose of debilitating dung spors for the Holiday Season… your FRIEND’S device might not be so… friendly.

So rather than allowing yourself to be handed a half-dozen toilet seats worth of norovirus – the new digital etiquette is to simply say: ‘Can you show me?’… and keep your hands WELL AWAY from that thing!