Is the toilet seat really the dirtiest place in the home?

Would you chop your vegetables on your toilet seat? I think pretty much all of us would say No. But maybe we should think again.
Dr Chuck Gerba, professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona, studies how diseases are transferred through the environment. This involves swabbing household items and measuring how many bacteria - and what sort - develop.
He particularly looks for faecal bacteria such as E.coli and staphylococcus aureus.
His studies have found that on the average toilet seat there are 50 bacteria per square inch.

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A new benchmark

The toilet seat is now regularly used as a unit of dirt.
"Now hear this! Your cellphone is as dirty as a toilet seat," writes the New York Post.
"Which? found that the keyboards at its London offices contained up to five times more germs than a toilet seat," reports the Daily Mail.
"Keyboards can carry more than 200 times as many bacteria as a toilet seat," says USA Today.

"It's one of the cleanest things you'll run across in terms of micro-organisms," he says. "It's our gold standard - there are not many things cleaner than a toilet seat when it comes to germs."

We should be more worried about other household items, it seems.
"Usually there are about 200 times more faecal bacteria on the average cutting board than on a toilet seat," he says.
In the kitchen it doesn't necessarily get there through actual contact with faeces. It comes via raw meat products or the viscera from inside of the animal, where a lot of the faecal bacteria originate.

FROM : BBC NEWS