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Using The Same Water Bottle Twice May Be As Gross As Drinking From A Toilet

Would you rather lick a toilet seat, or drink from a water bottle you've already used a couple of times?

Easy! Right?

Wrong. It turns out that those reusable water bottles have the potential to carry more bacteria than a toilet seat.

Research carried out by TreadmillReviews.net found that straw-top bottles were covered in 25 colony-forming units per square centimeter (CFU/sq cm) of bacteria. This is only two CFU/sq cm less than the average toilet seat at home.

Alarmingly, it gets worse. Much worse.

The average reusable water bottle has 313,499 CFU/sq cm.

Treadmill Review

According to the study, which tested 12 water bottles, the most bacteria-ridden vessel is a slide-top.

This had 933,340 CFU/sq cm. Next was the squeeze-top at 161,971, and then the screw-top at 159,060.

To put this in perspective, the average dog toy has 2,937 CFU/sq cm.

*Throws out every water vessel in house*

Part of the study reads,

The different types of bottles we tested each hosted a unique combination of bacteria types. Surprisingly, 99 percent of the germs on the squeeze-top bottles and 98 percent of the germs on the screw-top bottles are the bad kind – gram-negative rods (of which E. coli is one example.) These types of germs have been known to cause conditions such as pneumonia and blood infections in health care settings, and they can even resist antibiotics.

Well, that can't be good.