Dirty Students Should Clean up their Act

A new study has revealed that the kitchen floor of an average student house contains more bacteria than is found on a public toilet seat.

Pretty disgusting eh?

The research, carried out by a team of scientists from Leeds Metropolitan University for Vileda, and shows that the kitchen floor in student accommodation commonly contains more harmful bacteria than anywhere else in the home.

The team examined the kitchen floors of seven different groups – student houses, retired couples, single professionals, married couples with no children and married couples with children (some with pets, some without pets) – which hadn’t been mopped for a week.

Alan Edmondson, Leeds Met’s Faculty of Health spokesman, said: “The levels of bacteria on the student kitchen floor after one week were higher than those you would find on average on pub toilet seats.”

“Over a whole kitchen floor of average size this would equate to roughly six million bacteria.”

There were large variations in the amount of bacteria found on all the sample kitchen floors prior to cleaning but, apart from the student accommodation, the most bacteria were found on the floors of the households with pets – occupied by retired couples and the married couples with children.
Bacteria were found in high numbers on the mop used in the student accommodation too. The bacteria were typically those found in soil, dust and skin but there was also evidence of faecal matter present too.

In fact, it had been so long since mops in the student accommodation had been cleaned that the floor was actually more infested with bacteria after it had been mopped. The mop head tested was found to contain more than eight million bacteria per 100cm2.

The households with pets had the highest bacteria counts - even more than in the student home – prior to cleaning. But the married couple without pets had by far the cleanest kitchen floor.

"The results highlight the importance of good cleaning technique particularly involving the use of a clean mop. This was especially marked in the cases of the married couple with children (and pets), where there was a 10,000-fold reduction in bacterial contamination after using a clean mop, compared to the student house, where there was no reduction at all.” Dr Edmondson concluded.

Vileda spokesman Lindsey Taylor said: “We all know that students are often too busy concentrating on their studies to spend time on housework but the amount of bacteria found on their kitchen floor after mopping was shocking.

“It just proves that people need to wash their mops and clean their floors regularly, especially if they have pets, to avoid an infestation of potentially harmful bacteria.”

Our advice would be to clean your floor regularly, and make sure you use a clean mop head to do it. The 3Action SuperMocio can be machine washed to ensure that it’s totally clean every time you use it!