As a slight germophobe, toilets are not my favorite. This is especially true of the ones in public places, which are sometimes such blatant displays of depravity that I think humans don't deserve anything good in the world, period. But all that fecal disgustingness aside, are there actual health risks from putting your bits where other bits have gone before? Is it true that you can catch a sexually transmitted infection from a toilet seat, or is that one of those completely false gynecological urban legends?
Readers, you can rest easy. There’s basically no chance of you contracting an STI from a toilet seat, and any chance thatdoes**exist is so negligible that it’s not worth devoting much brainpower to, Mary Jane Minkin, M.D., a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale Medical School, tells SELF. “Most of these microbiological bad guys don’t like to live outside of nice, warm human tissue,” she explains. “They do much better with skin-to-skin contact and fluids” than hanging out on cold, hard toilet seats.
In a previous article about why there's not much point in putting toilet paper on the seat, Philip Tierno, Ph.D., clinical professor in the departments of microbiology and pathology at NYU Langone Medical Center, told SELF that viruses like herpes, chlamydia, and gonorrhea can only live outside of the body for around 10 seconds. "The top of a toilet seat is much cleaner than most people’s kitchen sinks,” he said.
Minkin says she did have one patient show up in her office with herpes lesions on her thighs that she claimed were from a bathroom on a public bus. And while Minkin can’t know for sure one way or the other—“[the lesions] were in a perfect distribution on her thighs in a way that would be consistent with a toilet seat”—she thinks it’s more likely it came from sexual contact the woman wasn’t owning up to. “The patient may have been mortally embarrassed about getting herpes. I have no proof she didn’t have sexual contact, so you never know—sometimes people don’t want to tell you,” she says.
According to the Mayo Clinic, "Because the [herpes] virus dies quickly outside of the body, it's nearly impossible to get the infection through contact with toilets, towels, or other objects used by an infected person."
Same goes for STIs like syphilis, HPV, HIV, and even pubic lice, all of which aren't transmissible via toilet seats according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You'd basically have to try to get an STI from a toilet by rubbing an open wound or mucous membrane all over fluids left there by someone who had used the toilet only seconds before. So, while there are plenty of reasons not to be a huge fan of public toilet seats, the chance of getting an STI isn't one of them.
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