By: Ty Brennan

This year the H1N1 virus seems to be on the minds of many east Idahoans as thousands have lined up around the state for the vaccine, but there could be a way to avoid H1N1 and other illnesses by just being aware of the dirty world around you.

The idea of germs out there is something that more Americans are becoming aware of, but you may be surprised to find out what things you touch on a daily basis that have the most bacteria.

From phones, door handles, to shopping carts.  It's the things you can't see on those surfaces that could make you sick.

Wayne Hatch, Doctorate Student of Biology, ISU: “We're basically going to be using sterile swabs with sterile water to swab the areas and also the plates.”

We enlisted the help of Wayne Hatch, a doctorate student of biology at Idaho State University to help us conduct a little experiment to find out just how much bacteria are on the surfaces we touch on a daily basis.

We tested seven different areas, a shopping cart handle, a steering wheel to one of our news cars, a gas station pump handle, door handle, two different phones, a purse and two different computer keyboards at the TV station.

After testing the phone and keyboard, we then wiped them down with a disinfecting wipe and re-tested.

The bacterial cells need one to two days inside an incubator at a constant temperature of 80 degrees to grow.

Wayne Hatch: “So, we're starting with whatever we picked up from our surfaces in the environment and you’re starting with that one organism or however many were there and they're going to divide and multiply.”

After 72 hours, we had our results.

Wayne Hatch: “We found a few that weren't very dirty and we found a lot that were pretty dirty.”

Surprisingly, the shopping cart handle and car steering wheel showed the least amount of bacteria colonies present. However, the gas station handle showed multiple colonies as did the purse and door handle with multiple bacteria colonies and mold.

The most shocking finds were from the keyboard and phones in the newsroom that weren't used as often as the others.  The bacteria from those surfaces covered almost the entire Petri dish with bacteria and mold.

Wayne Hatch: “From this test bacteria and fungi are out there.  Don’t be too paranoid about what’s out there, but also just be aware that you can potentially pick something up from anywhere.”

It is important to point out that for the sake of time we weren’t able to test the bacteria that we found to see if it was in fact harmful.  Our experiment was to just show how much bacteria is present on a particular surface.  As for disinfectant wipes they did their job, and killed most bacteria on the surfaces that we tested.