Viva Woman

For BloggerTips, I’m featuring a piece of informative article about handbags posted by Jan in her blog My Lovely Rays. 

Dirty handbags revealed
Women carry handbags everywhere, from the office to public toilets to the floor of the car. Most women won’t be caught without their handbags, but did they ever stop to think about where their handbags go during the day and what was on the bottom of their handbags?

Nelson Laboratories in Salt Lake decided to do a test on the average woman’s handbag.  It turns out handbags are so surprisingly dirty, even the microbiologist who tested them was shocked.

Microbiologist Amy Karen of Nelson Labs says nearly all of the handbags tested were not only high in bacteria, but high in harmful kinds of bacteria. Pseudomonas can cause eye infections, staphylococcus aurous can cause serious skin infections, and salmonella and e-coli found on the handbags could make people very sick.

In one sampling, four of five handbags tested positive for salmonella, and that’s not the worst of it. “There is fecal contamination on the handbags,” says Amy.

Leather or vinyl handbags tended to be cleaner than cloth handbags, and lifestyle seemed to play a role.

People with kids tended to have dirtier handbags than those without, with one exception. The handbag of one single woman who frequented nightclubs had one of the worst contaminations of all.

“Some type of feces, or possibly vomit” says Amy.

So the moral of this story - your handbag won’t kill you, but it does have the potential to make you very sick if you keep it on places where you eat.

Use hooks to hang your handbag at home and in toilets, and don’t put it on your desk, a restaurant table, or on your kitchen countertop.  Better still, wash or clean your handbag regularly.

© www.vivawoman.net copyright notice
_______________________________________________________