The Nasty Truth About 'Poo Plumes' — And How To Protect Yourself From Them

A wise philosopher once noted, “everybody poops,” and if you live in the United States and many other parts of the world, you’re probably using a toilet when you do.

So just how germy are they? And what can we do to keep our toilets, our bathrooms, and ourselves as fecal-matter-free as possible?

That’s what we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — asked microbiologist Jason Tetro, aka “The Germ Guy,” when he recently chatted with us about the grossest parts of our bathrooms and how to vanquish the bad germs that might be thriving in them.

Listen to the full episode by pressing play:

“There are trillions and trillions and trillions of microbes that are essentially part of you,” Tetro, the author of “The Germ Files” and “The Germ Code,” told us. “The majority of them happen to be in your gastrointestinal system… As you might expect then, the majority of germs that we’re going to encounter in any household happen to be in the toilet.”

Many of those microbes are harmless, but some can make us sick. Even though our toilets do a great job of capturing and eliminating our waste, rogue “poo particles” (a decidedly non-scientific term Michelson used) can still escape the bowl — especially if we don’t shut the lid when we flush.

“This first started [to be studied in 1976], and the whole idea was, is there something that’s coming out of the toilet when you flush it if you don’t keep the lid down?” Tetro said. “[Back then we called it] a ‘plume.’ So it’s not ‘poo particles,’ it’s a plume of droplets in the air.”

Scientists placed petri dishes around a toilet, flushed it multiple times, and looked to see if anything sprouted.

“Sure enough, within six feet of that toilet, you had