As cold and flu season begins—and COVID continues to spread—you may be washing your hands more than usual. But how often do you clean the place you clean your hands? When it comes to dangerous microbes, new research out of Australia suggests your sink comes close to carrying everything but, well, the kitchen sink.
Both hospital and residential sinks are breeding grounds for pathogens capable of causing illnesses including pneumonia, wound infections, and Legionnaires’ disease, a severe type of pneumonia stemming from Legionella bacteria, according to researchers at Flinders University in South Australia. Their findings were published this summer in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
