‘More bacteria on phones than on toilets’

Mobile phones carry 10 times more bacteria than toilet seats, so it shouldn’t be surprising that a man in Uganda reportedly contracted Ebola after stealing one.

He stole the phone from a quarantined hospital ward near the site of a recent Ebola outbreak, reports said. But regardless of your proximity to an Ebola outbreak, your cellphone is still probably grimy, said Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona.

“They’ve got quite a bit on them,” Mr Gerba said. “When’s the last time you cleaned your cellphone?”

While toilets tend to get cleaned frequently, because people associate the bathroom with germs, cellphones and other commonly handled objects such as remote controls are often left out of cleaning routines.

However, the amount of germs on a phone isn’t a problem — it’s the sharing of phones between people.

Without sharing, each phone carries just one set of germs and won’t get its owner sick, Mr Gerba said.