Another place "dirtier than the toilet"
"If you drop bread crumbs in your beard, someone will start there"
Who lives in a man's beardWhether a person's beard is really as dirty as a toilet, who lives in a beard and how scientists examined the beard, the science department of the Newspaper was investigating.
Ru».
A month ago, a number of Western media reported terrible news for awareness: they say that no less bacteria live in a person's beard than in a sewer. "Some beards contain more excrement than the toilet, a shocking study shows," the Mirror wrote. "Some beards are as dirty as toilets," the publication warned metro.co.uk .
A simple search on the Internet led to the source of the stuffing: it turned out to be journalists from one of the TV channels in the US state of New Mexico, who took several swabs from the male beards of volunteers and took them to the Quest Diagnostics laboratory.
Microbiologist John Golobik reported that he found intestinal bacteria in the smears: "These are the types of bacteria that can be found in feces."
The phrase thrown on the move turned out to be enough for the tabloids to "find" impurities in the vegetation on the men's faces. Meanwhile, Quest Diagnostics is not a research organization and only provides analysis services for doctors and hospitals.
In any case, there is no cause for concern. Serious scientific studies of microbes living in a human beard exist, that is, humanity has a good idea of who lives there. And it has long been known that human skin is a refuge for a huge community of microbes, including E.coli, which occurs in the intestines of humans and other warm–blooded organisms.
In 2000, the journal Anaesthesia published a study on how surgical masks worn during surgery collect bacteria on themselves and, most importantly, how the presence of a beard affects their number. During the experiments, scientists found out how many microbes fall from the mask when it is accidentally moved on the face by bearded men, women or shaved men.
It turned out that there are much more germs from the masks of bearded men than from the bandages of clean-shaven ones. This is especially noticeable when a person accidentally moves the mask.
"They found out that bearded men carry more bacteria than non-bearded men or women. And bearded surgeons in masks pour more organisms from the beard while moving," says Professor Anthony Hilton from Aston University (UK). According to him, there is nothing wrong with the fact that there are different bacteria in the beard. "20 thousand bacteria can be found on the skin, so there is nothing dangerous in this," he believes.
"I didn't think about who lives there any more than about the other surfaces and insides of my body," he told the Newspaper.Ru" the owner of one of the most colorful beards among the figures of the Russian scientific world, Professor Mikhail Gelfand, Deputy Director for Science of the Institute of Problems of Information Transmission. "The Human Microbiome project also studied the microbiome of hair, though not beard, but ordinary, from the head, and found a lot of cyanobacteria there."
According to him, in order not to multiply the fauna in the beard, it is necessary to observe the usual hygiene standards. "If you wash, there will be fewer bacteria in the beard, if you don't wash, there will be more. If you drop bread crumbs into your beard, then someone will be there who will eat these crumbs," the scientist stated.
The beard as an object of scientific research does not appear in scientific publications so often. For example, in 2012, scientists from the Central Institute of Medical Service in Germany wondered if it was possible to find out from the analysis of beard hair how long its owner had been drinking. With the help of volunteers who were asked to drink alcohol and then shave their beard, it was found out that traces of ethylglucuronides, products of alcohol breakdown, appear in the beard nine hours after libations and remain in it for eight to ten days.
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17.06.2015