This is no joke! Please read!

I really can see this happening. My gym has handwash for everyone to use before, during, and after workouts. They also provide a towel for everyone to use and then it goes into a hamper after you are done with it. You never know what someone who works out before you might have. They could have something and not know it and be spreading it around everywhere.....or I could for that matter.:embarassed:

Thanks for sharing!!!:flowerforyou: :flowerforyou:

Yikes... my father died of complications of MRSA last Fall, that article is practically enough to keep me from joining a gym at all. I guess I am adding a host of antibacterial items to my shopping list.

Teach yourself how to become a germophobe & you will greatly reduce your chances of inheriting daily grungies.

NAsty. I always wipe down the machines before AND after I use them. will be even more viligant now!

I always wipe the equipment after but now I think I'll start before too!

Glad I workout at home. Gym always got my son sick in childcare so I cancelled my membership. Yeah for home gym equipment.

here's one for y'all. When you're wiping down the machines at the gym. Are you using that same towel to wipe youself ? Or to sit on ?
eeeeewwwwwww!!!!!

This is why my gym has sanitizer wipe stations (looks like an upside down papertowel dispenser, but the towels are soaked with sanitizer) and requires everyone to wipe down the equipment after use. We're also required to carry a sweat towel (and use it) in order to even step foot on the exercise floor. On top of that, I carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer on my lanyard around my neck (wallet, keys, hand sanitizer) and use it regularly. I've been in the gym business for 14 years and an avid member before that and have never gotten a skin infection from there. But I'm a germaphobe who literally had to wash my hands like 20 times between making mud pies as a child, so maybe it's just my overuse of antimicrobial products. LOL

Hi everyone. Yes, infections, particularly MRSA are bad news. It is said that over 50% of us carry MRSA in our nose and it never affects us unless our immune system is compromised. I am intimately familiar as MRSA killed my 87 year old father over a 3 year period. He had been on dialysis for over 10 years when he passed. This process and the failure of the kidney's are known to compromise your immune system and the circulation in your extremities, similar to diabetes.

The bottom line: yes, this is a potentially serious exposure we all live with on a daily basis, so are bad people and drunks driving cars. You can't live your life as a hermit. The best thing you can do is use reasonable caution and clean your hands and yourself regularly. If more people were better about washing their hands several times a day, the exposure for everyone would be lessened substantially. So live your life, clean your hands and seek treatment promptly if something unusual pops up on your skin. Remember, they are "Resistant" infections, but so far they are still curable if you are in reasonable health. Hope this helps!

Ditto Suzanne. I work out at home now as well. My kids were always sick from the child care room and I was always getting something also.

And, as an early elementary school teacher, I have pretty good resistance to getting sick.....

Might seem a little alarmist but I always think better safe than sorry...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/health/03brod.html?src=me&ref=general

Am I the only one that gets a NY times subscription box that pops up and asks for you to subscribe or sign in?

I think you also have to keep this in perspective. First of all, you are exposed to many of the same germs whenever you do out in public. Unless you want to be like Howard Hughes or the boy in the bubble, you have to go out in the big world sometimes.

Secondly, for all the data reported in the story, given the tens of millions of gym visits that occur each year, the number of infections is still relatively small.

Obviously, it's something that we all want to be aware of, and you want to improve your odds, but I also think obsessing about it can be just as bad.

I work in a fitness center and have the unenviable task of picking up after all the privileged little yuppie larvae who think I am paid to be their cabana boy. As a staff, we debate amongst ourselves whether or not to wear gloves when picking up used towels. It's impractical to do so for every single towel--I will wear them when cleaning up after a large group in the gym, but use the "fingertip pinch" method when doing routine pickups on the fitness floor--and liberal use of the hand sanitizer.

Our members are very good about wiping down the cardio machines after they are finished, but not so much with the strength. I am always amazed at guys who would never dream of walking away from a dripping treadmill, but who don't think twice about leaving greasy, sweaty "head stains" on the pads of the strength equipment.

With the exception of public bathrooms, I am totally NOT a germ-a-phobe -- almost to the point of being too cavalier about the prospect of infections. I suppose I should work on that.

I work at a bank and come in contact with lots of germs!! I use my hand sanitizer anytime I take anything from a customer, touch the money in my drawer, handle tickets, etc. and of course before I eat. I try to wash my hands every hour or so as well.

Ironically, the keyboard in front of you is probably more germ-infested than a regularly cleaned public bathroom.

So true. I just remembered a Mythbusters episode. A light switch is really bad as well.
I just got the details from a website.


Many objects that people touch every day are dirtier than a toilet seat.
confirmed

Adam and Jamie chose a total of 8 objects to test for cleanliness: toilet seat, money, kitchen sponge, hotel room remote, computer keyboard, light switch, cell phone, and shopping cart. They swabbed each surface for 10 seconds and created Petri dishes from the swabs that incubated overnight. Their first method of measurement was to count the number of microorganism colonies on each dish. They found that the toilet seat sample actually had the fewest colonies, while the kitchen sponge sample had more than they could count:

kitchen sponge (most colonies)
money
light switch
computer keyboard
hotel remote
shopping cart
cell phone
toilet seat (fewest colonies)

However, they always wanted to account for the “nastiness” or harmfulness of the types of organisms on each Petri dish, so they had a microbiologist re-rank the samples. The list was as follows.

kitchen sponge (most nasty)
money
light switch
computer keyboard
toilet seat
cell phone
shopping cart
hotel remote (least nasty)
Finally, Adam and Jamie decided they needed a larger sample size to provide better results. They enlisted a group of biology students at UC Berkeley to collect more samples from the top five dirtiest surfaces. After collecting and analyzing these samples, the final list was as follows.

kitchen sponge (most dirty)
money
computer keyboard
toilet seat
light switch (least dirty)