I spent last week in Florida with several of those days at Disney World in Orlando – what a great place. Of course I had the need to go to the ladies room on numerous occasions and I have one question!: What are females doing that causes them to leave urine on the toilet seat? I swear over a 2 day period I went into many restrooms and at three different ones there was urine on the toilet seat in the stall I was lucky enough to go into. Each time I was not only disgusted, but also intrigued as to how someone could do this – AND leave it there for the next person to deal with. UGH! Ok, I am an intelligent person, or so I like to believe, and I understand physics enough to know if a female sits on the top of the toilet seat and urinates, it will not – no matter how hard you pee – get onto the top of the seat. Just won’t happen. Now, if someone was weird enough to stand over the commode and pee then it may very well get on the seat, and all over the floor – besides, why would you do that anyway, someone would see your feet and wonder what you were doing. Next theory I came up with is it was a small male – again why leave it there, don’t parents teach the little boys to wipe the seat. I always told my kids the famous saying “If you sprinkle when you tinkle please be neat and wipe the seat” – words to live by. Lastly I had a vision of a female hovering over the seat (not sure how) and going tinkle – this surely would get some on the seat. But again, WHY NOT wipe it up? Ok, with all that said let me tell you some information about public toilet seats.
Here is a great quote I have heard from many physicians - "To my knowledge, no one has ever acquired an STD on the toilet seat -- unless they were having sex on the toilet seat!" says Abigail Salyers, PhD, president of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). This is a great article about what could be found in a restroom. WebMD article "What can you catch in restrooms" Here is another interesting fact posted by ABC news and it was on the BBC news as well - Your Keyboard - dirtier than a toilet!
*This was found on MSN diseases & Conditions/health topics. "You’re the only one who uses it, so how dirty can it be? In a word: filthy. A study by researchers at the University of North Carolina Health Care System found that keyboards were loaded with germs.
Even more disgusting, the average public toilet bowl contains 41 germs per square inch. The average personal keyboard? Some 21,000 germs per square inch. “Toilet bowls get cleaned,” says Philip M. Tierno Jr., Ph.D., director of clinical microbiology and immunology at New York University Langone Medical Center, “but keyboards rarely do.”'
I found an interesting link on Yahoo Answers regarding the question “Is there research that shows that using a paper toilet seat makes a difference? It seems like paper would not do much to stop the spread of germs or disease.” - one answer was “Liz W. is right! They protect you from hypothetical germs. The seat covers are provided to make people feel better. They don't help, but they don't do any harm either. If the toilet seat is soaked with body fluid (I know, yuck), then the body fluid will soak right through the paper seat cover. The toilet seat may be, as other posters suggest, cleaner than other surfaces like the stall door lock or the hot-water faucet. My students did an experiment where they swabbed various surfaces and grew bacteria in agar dishes. The dirtiest surface? A doorknob! The next dirtiest? A fellow student's unwashed hands! The toilet-seat swab grew no bacteria.” Source(s): I am a healthcare teaching assistant.
Personally if I find some drops of urine on the seat I take a wad of toilet paper and clean it up – if it is really disgusting I go to another stall. I have heard in some studies done in public restrooms show the first stall is the cleanest. Seems many people want more privacy and go to the back stalls and skip the first one – I have been doing this for years since hearing it and I have to say most of the time it is true. (Not that I take a Petri dish in there and test it!) Here is another article by ABC I found quite funny and interesting Myth: Toilet Seats Are the Dirtiest Thing in the Bathroom.
So please stop hovering the seats making it gross for the rest of us, just sit on it – and wash your hands afterwards!!!
Disney was a truly magical place – even if the guests can’t urinate in the toilets.
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