October 15 is Global Handwashing Day

Today is Global Handwashing Day. We know, we know: eww! When it comes to that ill-advised hot dog wolfed at a highway rest stop, we are all like Mulder on the X-Files: we want to believe. That counter’s clean, the food freshly prepared by people who treat every day as handwashing day. So this must be one of those silly, made-up holidays. Right? Why are we still talking about this?

Global Handwashing Day was founded in 2008 by the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing to raise awareness of how proper hygiene can prevent disease transmitted by hand. Here’s a tweet promoting the holiday and the graphic embedded in it.

Why #GlobalHandwashingDay? B/C 1 trillion germs can live in 1 gram of poop (abt weight of a paper clip)! http://bit.ly/1JUaOrD

Wait a minute. The numbers in the tweet and its graphic don’t match. Although I think we can all agree that either number is unsettling, we feel it’s our duty to get to the bottom of this. Who knew that researching this would end up in such a dark place?

Okay, now that we’ve gotten our juvenile punning (mostly) out of the way, let’s learn a little bit about the strangers in our poop. According to a study cited by the Centers for Disease Control, a gram of feces can contain a total of 1 trillion germs. So the tweet is right. Reporting of the number of viruses and bacteria, however, varies wildly. You might want to take our word for it. The Google search alone will make you want to douse yourself in hand sanitizer (which, by the way, isn’t as effective as you might think.)

Now that you’ve got a face full of feces facts, here’s a dollop more. A German site called my.microbes aims to be the first social network to connect members with similar microbial profiles to “share experiences, remedies, health and diet tips.” Watch out, Match.com! [2025 Update: Since I wrote this in 2015, this German site has been so well scrubbed and/or buried that the only mention I found on Google is my cross-post on sister site Magick Sandwich. I had to resort to the Wayback Machine to prove this site was real. No BS!]

If you’ve got your mind on your manure and your manure on your mind, track your output with the Poop Log app. According to the developer, he updated it to include the ability to attach photos because “it is the most requested feature from my users.” Poop Log allows you to track your bowel movements using the Bristol Stool Scale. [In 2015, this was the only poop tracking app we could find. Ten years later, there are at least fifteen offered on Google Play. A healthy deposit, in our opinion.]

The Bristol Scale was devised in England and is very, well, descriptive. Click here to view it, but maybe not when you’re eating sausage. We’re not showing it here because we don’t want to support poop porn. We will show you this enthusiastic review of PoopLog, though: Leland, we wish you the best in your turd analysis. Perhaps Places I’ve Pooped might be a useful app for you, too. Just a quick word of advice: turn off the flash when you take a shelfie™* in a public place, which we fervently hope is a restroom. The uninformed might frown on you taking a photo of what came from your posterior for posterity.