I have never been a fan of public showers, and now I have reason to actually fear them. I will be more diligent about washing my hands after I use the treadmill, though.
Bonus points for finding the typo in The New York Times!
Why I Don’t Shower At The Gym
The news of staff infections spreading through schools coincides with a report by doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that nearly 19,000 people had died in the United States in 2005 after an MRSA infection. How many points do I get???
Yay!!! You get a million bonus points. p.s. I miss you!
Millard North reported staPH infections this week too… again.
7th paragraph…staff instead of staph….although maybe it isn’t a typo, and they do have staff with infections 😉Oh, and I always wiped down the gym equipment BEFORE I’d use it, too. My gym actually had disenfectant spray bottles and towels spaced throughout the gym.
re: “I have never been a fan of public showers…”So there are folks in the world that actually are “fans” of public showers ??? If so, I don’t want to meet them.
staff infection? Oy, that’s brings a whole bunch of visual images…one being the infection being zombie-itis.
I read recently that it is actually recommended that you DO shower at the gym to reduce your risk of staph infections. A woman at our gym got a staph infection presumably from the weights (she had some sort of cut that became infected) and she never showers at the gym. (In fact the trainer who told me said that was probably largely why and she could have avoided it had she showered immediately after working out. I don’t know about that.) I wear flip flops and have never had any trouble, I don’t think it is is any more dangerous then using an ATM (probably a lot less so because ATM’s don’t have soap flying around). I believe Staph generally requires some sort of open wound to become a situation. I found the fact that it was antibiotic resistant more troubling. All our over-use of anti bacterials coming back to bite us just as predicted..ACK
Leave it to my dr hubby to lessen the severity of the issue. I told him about the article, to which he calmly replied “25% of the population carries staph in their noses…staph is everywhere…it’s probably in our house even”And I agree with Kirsty…although I haven’t touched an ATM in 10 years…but I think of the shopping carts at the grocery store…ick!
Wow! Who knew an article about staph would elicit such a response! I guess on this topic I agree with Stephen Colbert when he said after you throw away a copy of the New York Times, it takes a hundred years for its lies to biodegrade.