From the school of the bleeding obvious. If we go to all the trouble to clean our bedding, and then are the only ones to sleep in it, it would shocking to find otherwise.
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It’s my dogs’ bed but they let me share.
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Okay. All recent articles about fecal-matter-in-X are really annoying me. I take a thorough shower right before bed and I never pass gas in bed (out of respect for my wife), plus I do not have any sort of anal leakage; can I conclude that there is no fecal matter in my sheets? We have a Casper mattress, so I know we don’t have dust mites in our bed, therefore, no fecal matter from dust mites, right? By the way, we wash/change our sheets every 2 weeks (sometimes once a week if it was a hot week). Furthermore, I wash my hands thoroughly at least twice after using the toilet (even if my hands only touch the toilet paper), so can I conclude that there is no fecal matter on my keyboard and mouse? Am I the only one that is annoyed with fecal matter related articles? Thank you.
There is fecal matter everywhere.
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It’s kind of like the fecal matter of knowledge…I come here to Boing Boing and shortly I’m covered by way more information about people than I want.
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Yep… it’s you.
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Rules of Engagement
Jeff Bingham: "You get ready for bed.You put your sweats on, whatever…"
Jennifer Morgan: "No, actually, we sleep naked."
Jeff: "I’m sorry, what?"
Jennifer: “Totally naked…Except for a pair of moisturizing gloves.”
Audrey Bingham: “Oh, do those work?”
Jennifer: “I don’t know. Ask Adam.”
Audrey: “Oh, I’m good.”
Jeff: "So there’s no barrier between your business and your bed?"
Jennifer: “Correct.”
Jeff: "So your sheets become a giant pair of underpants?"
Adam: “What do you care what we do?”
Jeff: “Just stay out of this!”
Adam: “But this is my thing! Whatever!”
Jeff: "No sides, no clothes, no rules–basically your bedroom is Thunderdome.
Adam: “Thunderdome, like that movie? Like, 100 years ago? Whatever.”
Jeff: "Filthy, naked hippies."
You’re essentially just extending your personal ecosystem into your surroundings. Which is bad because… ?
Human beings are mostly composed of bacteria, if we compare cell counts. So, uh… burn us with fire?
And we’ve got fecal bacteria on our skin. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with them, or they shouldn’t be there. Having “saliva, skin and fecal bacteria” as a set is more like having a stat about nurses, teachers and farmers.
No, no and no. Ha ha ha, no. Even if you’re doing a full surgical scrub when hand-washing, you’re mostly (and not even completely) removing transient bacteria (that you pick up from your surrounding) rather than resident bacteria (that live on you full time and include “fecal” bacteria). Equivalent showering would involve several showers with anti-bacteria soap and swabbing down with sterilizing antibacterial surgical swipes afterwards. You’ve got bacteria everywhere, including your pores. Bacteria also reproduce quickly. Under ideal conditions, e coli can double every 30 minutes. So at the end of a nice, warm, cozy sleep, you could have tens of thousands of times more bacteria than you did when you went to bed. Which means you could be as sterile as is humanly possible when you went to bed (but you definitely aren’t), and you’d be covered with just as many bacteria as anyone else when you woke up.
You have dust mites. You just do. You also have skin mites living on/in your skin. You can’t get rid of them, either. They don’t defecate. They hold their waste in until they die, exploding in a burst of mite-poop. I’m not kidding.
This is all normal, unavoidable and actually desirable - if you managed to actually remove the normal flora and mites from your life, you’d be riddled with autoimmune disorders and diseases as transient bacteria, unchecked by your normal flora, started eating into you.
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Oh, so YOU’RE the other person! I thought I was the only one washing my pillows. Do you flip your mattress, too?
Most of my questions were about actual fecal matter. This is because many recent articles about actual fecal matter implied (and/or inferred) that people don’t wash their hands after they use the toilet. Example: A list of poop-filled places beyond the bathroom - Boing Boing
Well… According to the manufacturer of my mattress “As a mattress material, latex became popular as an alternative foam because its heat regulating properties help keep the bed cool, unlike memory foam. It is naturally resistant to mildew, mold, bed bugs, and dust mites.”
Source: Help
And here’s an archived link for those outside the US: Types of Mattresses: A Casper Mattress Comparison | Casper®
It is though? Is it really normal for some people to not wash their hands and end up with their actual fecal matter on their keyboards? Is it really normal for some people to go to bed naked without a shower after some anal play, getting actual fecal matter on their sheets? Is it really normal for some people to change/wash their bed sheets a couple of times a year?
I can understand that natural flora inside and outside of my body is necessary. I am worried that people might think it is normal to have actual human fecal matter everywhere in our houses.
Why does this matter? We are covered in bacteria, inside and out. This just seesm a ploy at activating germophobia in the reader.
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Not “fecal matter” but “fecal bacteria,” which may effectively be the same thing, and certainly it is the active bit of fecal matter, but it’s the self-replicating bit as well. Which, again, is everywhere you’ve been touching, however many times you wash your hands. You might infer that it’s there because people don’t wash their hands, but that’s not why.
“naturally resistant”
‘Resistant’ is a meaningless word in advertising copy.
Is it really normal for some people to not wash their hands and end up with their actual fecal matter on their keyboards?
Again, it’s not a failure to wash, and it’s fecal bacteria. It’s not “some people” it’s everyone. It’s all over your body, and it’s only if you have a pathogen in your flora that it’s a problem for anyone else even. (People who live together tend to exchange flora by contact.) Hell, the average shower probably redistributes fecal bacteria over your body during the washing process so that it ends up in places it might not otherwise be. It certainly doesn’t get rid of it.
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Well. Clearly that ploy worked on me.
Fecal matter is far more present in our day-to-day lives then we might hope. This is well evidenced by the fact that people who live together tend to have the same gut biomes. Poop is everywhere on the microscopic level. Poop and drool, apparently.
Right on. Let’s compare a human bed that has been slept in for exactly one night with a chimp’s nest, and let’s also test for something that actually matters: parasites.
The study is being misinterpreted. The study is referring to “percentage of the bacterial species found”. It just means that a larger percentage of the bacterial is from other organisms. The issue is that in human beds more of the bacteria found is from humans. In chimp beds, a lower percentage is from chimps. More of it is from other organisms. I’m guessing mice, roaches, birds, etc. so does that make the chimp bed “cleaner”? No its the opposite. It means that humans are more successful at keeping other organisms out of our beds, plus being in one bed ourselves consistently.
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“Resistant” doesn’t mean immune or inimical to those creatures. Also, do you walk on the floor? Dust mites on the floor- even hard wood. If you wear slippers everywhere, dust mites on those too. Then dust mites on your feet, and then in your bed.
It’s just one of those things. They are pretty much everywhere and it’s no big deal. Same with fecal matter. It is, for the most part, harmless to humans with normal immune systems. Most fecal bacteria is actually extremely useful to our digestive systems. Some bacteria and viruses carried in poo, like the norfolk virus or cholera, are very dangerous. Generally speaking, your own fecal matter/bacteria is pretty harmless to you. You wash your hands to remove other people’s fecal matter (which is all over the bathroom, no matter what you do), save other people from getting so much of your fecal matter, and to wash off the accumulated viruses/bacteria that you picked up since the last time you washed your hands. Like flu viruses.
In summary, it’s ok if your bed and home have some bacteria and fecal matter and what not in them. This is not to say you shouldn’t wash your hands, everyone should. We should also shower and clean our sheets, and all that. It’s just that a certain amount of these organisms is normal and healthy.
Also, if you find yourself very concerned about germs and fecal matter and such, may I gently suggest you talk to a few professionals about it? A few good scientists, maybe even a poo scientist, they will certainly help you understand how important bacteria is to our health and well being. And maybe a therapist, if you find the idea of the bacteria/fecal matter/mites is causing you any anxiety.
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