The beard of men has more harmful bacteria than dog hair

Swiss and Austrian scientists had a surprise when badyzing magnetic resonators. Its purpose was to determine if it was safe to use the same equipment for humans and animals, since their cost is generally used in dogs. Their discovery has impacted them: the dirty patients were really humans.

How is it possible? According to the results published in the scientific journal European Radiology, men's beards have more harmful human bacteria than the dirtiest part of dogs' fur. To determine this, they took skin and saliva samples from 18 bearded male participants aged 18 to 76 and compared them to the hair and saliva of 30 dogs. The data come from several European hospitals.

They were looking for colonies of human pathogens in both cases. They found that facial hair contained many more potentially harmful bacteria than canine hair. They also observed that they were people who left the resonators more contaminated. "Since the equipment used in both cases was routinely cleaned after the evaluation of an animal, there was a lower presence of microbes than in scans intended for humans only," he said. writes the researchers.

The research underlying the situation is that magnetic resonators are very expensive at veterinary clinics. In Europe, there is therefore a tendency to look for injuries in the brain and spine of dogs in the hospital equipment. Anyway, experts warn that this study It does not attempt to report beards as harmful but to demonstrate a problem of hygiene.

What emerges from the conclusions is that humans leave a lot more potentially infectious bacteria in hospitals than we think, and maybe cleaning the surfaces is not enough. In this sense, the article says that "there is no reason to think that women have a lower bacteriological burden than bearded men".

"The central question should not be if we allow dogs to access imaging studies in our hospitals.We should focus on the knowledge and perception of hygiene, as well as understand what puts our patients at risk"Warns the article.

All the men involved in the search had a high number of microbes in the skin and saliva, while in 23 of the 30 dogs the same thing happened.