Mobile phones dirtier than toilet seats: study

Mumbai: The mobile phone, which has become a necessity of humans, is dirtier than toilets seats. According to the studies conducted by scientists from Western nations, some of the smartphones even have deadly drug-resistant bacteria on them.

The astonishing finding by scientists of the government-owned National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS) has discovered and identified three new species of microbes on screens of mobile phones. The laboratory funded by the Department of Biotechnology identified two never-heard-before-bacteria and fungus in scientific literature.

Yogesh S. Shouche and his team from the Microbial Culture Collection group of the NCCS in Pune collected samples from screens of 27 mobile phones. The team then isolated 515 different bacterial types and 28 different fungi. Praveen Rahi, a co-investigator for the work said that the microbes identified are human-friendly and flourished on human bodies.  

Sterilised cotton swabs and sterile saline solution were used to wipe these microbes from the surface. These were then grown at 30 degrees centigrade.

The team came across three new species of organisms among which two bacteria were named lysinbacillus telephonicus and microbacterium telephonicum and a new species of fungi was named pyrenochaeta telephoni. The finding claimed that the situation is not bad in India even though there are more mobile phones than toilets in India.

William DePaolo, an assistant professor in the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology Department at the University of Southern California, had conducted a study in 2015. According to this study, while the toilet seats usually contained three different types of bacteria, the mobile phones on an average housed some ten to 12 various types of fungi and bacteria. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has published an alarming finding that 12 families of microbes were winning the war against anti-biotics and humanity urgently needed to discover new chemicals to kill these superbugs.