Toilet Seats

Touching a toilet seat will make you sick

Despite the fears of countless parents, no reputable health organization has ever targeted toilets as a serious way to catch an infection. It’s important to remember that most serious viruses and bacteria can’t live for very long outside the body. They are no more likely to survive on a toilet than on any other household surface. Let’s face it. Most of you are really concerned about picking up a really bad disease from the toilet. So let us put your mind at ease. You can’t catch HIV from a toilet. Nor are you likely to catch a sexually transmitted disease from a toilet (see our next toilet seat myth for more information about that). You’re pretty much safe from parasites as well. That’s not how those are spread.

You also need to remember that most infections do not enter through intact skin. They need to get into the mouth, an open wound, or a mucus membrane. So even if you sat on a germ, it wouldn’t necessarily infect you. If you wash your hands, anything you touched should be taken care of. Again, toilets pose no special danger.

Studies indicate that hardier viruses, like influenza A, can be found on toilets in day care centers. But viruses can be found even more commonly on kitchen dishcloths and diaper-changing areas. Toilets aren’t special.

In fact, there are lots of other things that are likely far more infectious than the toilet, and we bet you don’t think about them at all. Do you know how dirty money can be? Think about how many people have touched that. How about the phone? Your keyboard? In fact, people who eat at their work desks are far more likely to get infected than those who touch the toilet.

Of course, we will still flush it with our feet when we can. Come on.

You can get gonorrhea from the toilet seat

In an episode of one of our favorite television shows, Seinfeld, one of Jerry’s girlfriends has a mysterious “tractor story” that she is reluctant to tell him until their relationship progresses. Jerry thinks the story is going to explain the mysterious scar on the girl’s leg, but instead, the story ends up being that she supposedly got gonorrhea from sitting on the seat of a tractor in her bathing suit (at least, that is what her boyfriend told her was the cause).

While relatively few people spend time on tractor seats, a lot of people believe that they might get a sexually transmitted disease from a toilet seat. The fear of toilet seats springs from the idea that public toilets are filthy places full of bacteria, but also because many have heard that toilet seats could be to blame for such an infection. It seems a lot easier to blame the toilet than to blame your boyfriend.

When we refer to sexually transmitted diseases, we are talking about infections caused by either bacteria or viruses that are typically passed only when one person has sex or contact with the sexual organs of another person. These are diseases like chlamydia, gonorrhea, herpes, and infection with HIV. The scary idea that you could get one of these serious infections from a toilet seat is enough to make anyone want to hover over the toilet bowl, but it also offers an excuse for how you may have gotten one of these infections without sex being involved.

There is no research proving that people get infected with sexually transmitted diseases from sitting on toilet seats. This does not mean that it is impossible to get infected from a toilet seat, but there is no evidence either way. There are a few published cases where physicians describe patients who they believe may have become infected after direct contact with exceptionally dirty toilet seats, but in these cases, they cannot prove that the patients did not have physical or sexual contact of some kind with a person who was infected. The majority of experts, including the president of the American Society for Microbiology, report never seeing or hearing about cases of people actually acquiring an STD from a toilet seat (unless they were having sex with another person while on the toilet)!

Even though it may be theoretically possible to get infected from a toilet seat, there are many reasons why this is very unlikely to happen. First of all, most of the bugs that cause sexually transmitted diseases in humans do not survive well outside the human body. The viruses that cause herpes and AIDS do not live outside of the body for long. They dry out and die when exposed to air, and there have been no proven cases of people getting herpes or AIDS from a toilet seat. The bacteria that cause infections like chlamydia and gonorrhea do not live much longer. Second, for these bacteria to get onto the toilet seat, someone would first need to leave their bodily fluids on the toilet seat. Obviously, public toilet seats do end up with a lot of urine on them, but urine is not where these germs live. These germs live in the fluids in your vagina or penis, or sometimes in your blood. It is much less likely that someone would be rubbing against a toilet seat or sitting in a way that would leave discharge or secretions from their vagina or penis on the seat. People also do not usually bleed onto the toilet seat. Even if the bug did get onto the seat in one of these secretions and did manage to survive, it is not a sure thing that someone coming into contact with that bug-infested fluid would become infected. In fact, it is quite unlikely. The bugs would have to be transferred from the seat into your urethra or to your genital tract, or maybe into a cut or sore somewhere on your private parts. You would need to touch the gunk on the toilet seat with one of these parts. Finally, even if someone did leave a germ, it survived, and you touched it, it very well might not be enough of the germs to cause you an infection. For many of these infections, you need to come in contact with a pretty large number of them to make you sick. It is theroetically possible that just one or two germs might infect you, but it is incredibly unlikely.

If you know much about the different types of sexually transmitted infections, you might be wondering about the possibility of getting crabs or scabies from a toilet seat. Crabs are lice that live in your pubic hair. They are a different type of lice than the lice that live in the hair on your head, but they cause lots of itching and irritation. Just like the lice that live in the hair on your head, pubic lice are very contagious. Crabs or pubic lice are probably the infection that you could get the most easily from a toilet seat. This has not been studied well, and it would be very, very rare, but it is possible that you could get crabs from a toilet seat. Pubic lice can live for about twenty-four hours outside of the body, so they would not live there very long, but it is possible that one might wait on a toilet seat to infect you. Again, this is very unlikely, but the experts say it is possible.

Scabies is somewhat similar to crabs in that it is an itchy skin disease caused by little bugs called mites. Scabies can be spread through sexual contact or through being skin-to-skin or very close to someone with scabies. Experts also say that it might be possible to contract scabies if the mites are left on the toilet seat. This is, again, very unlikely, as things like close hugging or hand-shaking are only very rarely a way that people get infected with scabies. Scabies can live outside the body longer than some other bugs, but they still only live for about twenty-four to thirty-six hours outside of the human body.

Toilet seats are pretty gross (though they may be cleaner than sponges and faucets), but your risk of getting any sort of infection from a toilet seat, let alone a sexually transmitted infection, is incredibly low. You would be much, much better off using a condom regularly with your partners than worrying obsessively about the toilet seat. Not having sex is also a much more effective way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases than avoiding public toilets. While it might be reasonable to clean off the toilet seat with a wad of toilet paper or to try to squat without touching one, the most important advice is to wash your hands after using the bathroom and practice safe sex.