Tag Archives: fecal contamination

Research – Mobile Phones and Bugs

HACCPEUROPA

Our generation uses mobile phones and smartphones for work, college, making phone calls, reminders, sending messages, emails, music, photographs, games and the internet. Over 80% of the world citizens are in a possession of mobile phones.

With how attached people have become to their mobile phones or smartphones, it’s not a surprise that what we touch ends up on the screen. It’s what exactly ends up there that’s the real shocker.

Researchers from UW-Milwaukee’s Microbiology department tested heavily used mobile phones.

The tests found traces of E. coli and other coliforms. Coliforms are a bacteria indicating fecal contamination. They found between about 2,700 and 4,200 units of coliform bacteria on 8 phones.

Water Associated Disease Outbreak Research

Food Poisoning Bulletin 

Seventy-one percent of the world’s water-associated disease outbreaks reported between 1990 and 2008 were water-borne diseases caused by micro-organisms like E. coli that enter water through fecal contamination and cause infection when humans consume contaminated water.

Water-borne (including typhoid and cholera) — 70.9 percent.
Water-based, caused by parasites that spend part of their life in water — 2.9 percent.
Water-related (such as malaria), which need water for breeding of disease-carrying insects — 12.2 percent.
Water-washed, caused by poor hygiene because no clean water is available — 6.8 percent.
Water-dispersed, (such as Legionella), caused by infectious agents that thrive in water and enter the body through the respiratory tract — 7.3 percent.