New Study Finds The Dirtiest Thing In Your Hotel Room

The dirtiest thing in your hotel room is usually the first thing you touch: the light switch.

A new study shows that light switches and TV remotes are the dirtiest items in a hotel room.

Researchers from the University of Houston examined hotel rooms across the country in order to find the most germ infested items. The study noted that places like the sink and toilet were filled with bacteria, but bedside items like the lamp switch and the TV remote were the dirtiest items in the room.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that hotel items contain more germs than household items. They just contain the germs of strangers.

Study researcher Jay Neal, a microbiologist at the University of Houston, told Live Science that the remote control at a hotel isn’t “any dirtier than at home, but there’s a stranger factor.”

Neal also said that the hotel cleaning crew isn’t expected to ”have (rooms) ready for surgery” but said that there was room for improvement.

According to the study, which was presented today at a microbiology researchers’ conference in San Francisco, the bacteria levels in hotel rooms were 2 to 10 times higher than the accepted level in hospitals. This doesn’t guarantee that a person will get sick from staying in a hotel, but it does make it more likely.

Student Katie Kirsh said that the study could help hotels keep their rooms more clean by pinpointing trouble areas. For one, Kirsh notes that the cleaning cart, specifically the mop and sponge, contain high levels of bacteria. Kirsch suggests that cleaning crews could replace cleaning liquids more often to reduce the spread of bacteria.