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Do you know so many of you will climb into your cars today perhaps to shuffle your children to soccer, to football, make their (refer to the cars) run to the grocery store. But do you also know what's climbing into your cars with you? In Part one of our series "hidden germs: planes, trains and automobiles". We're gonna take a look at the germs living in your cars. ABC's Nacy Coders has more.
"Jack."
"What?"
"Did you make a mess? "
"No".
New Jersey mom, Debra Farber uses her SUV for a lot more than just getting from A to B.
"Er, I just wanted to confirm our appointment. "
Sometimes, it's an office. Sometimes it's a closet. Sometimes, a dining-room. "Jack, stop eating like a piglet".
With two kids under three years old, it's often a dining-room. "Jack! "
Like so many American moms, Debra, who works full time in pharmaceutical sales, lives in her car and it shows.
"Crumbs, raisins, bagels, anything that dog can't eat, it's in the car. And half the time, I 'm like jumping in and out of the car. I don't have time to clean it. I try to get to the carwash, you know, as often as I can but it doesn't always happen. "
Compare that to her husband Steven's brand new BMW, which the kids have only been allowed to ride in a couple of times.
"His car is like a sanitarium. He doesn't even let me drive the car. "
Debra admits she would never let her house get this way.
"This number actually represents millions of Bacteria. "
We asked germ expert Dr. Chuck Gerba to swab every inch of Debra 's car and Steven's to let them know, for better or worse, what's growing in there.
"We found that the cars were the moldiest of all forms of transportation that we looked at. "
He says most people don't realize their cars are perfect breeding grounds.
"From what we saw in cars germs seem to tend to build up because people aren't really cleaning or disinfecting these areas. We never thought about it before, but our germs are traveling with us and everybody that travels in that car carries their germs and leaves them in your car. "
"For a oatmeal's pretty good, it feeds children and bacteria at same time "
Dr. Gerba took the samples back to his lab at the University of Arizona, while Debra waited and worried.
"It's definitely making me nervous. I mean, obviously, I wouldn't want to expose the kids to any harm. So, they both have colds now and I'm sure you'll find plenty of germs in the car. "
Unfortunately, she is right. Dr. Gerba found millions of bacteria on the door handles, car seat and floor of Debra's SUV, compared to just a few hundred in Steven's new Bimmer. He even found MRSA, a staph bacteria that can cause skin infections.
"To germiest areas in your car are your dashboard, your change holder and where you keep your coffee, actually. The reason is the dashboard is because the air flows is over your dashboard and so, the bacteria tend to build up on that surface. "
We headed back to New Jersey to give Debra the bad news.
"On the car seat, Dr. Gerba found not thousands of bacteria but hundreds of thousands from the sample that he took, plus mold all over a Lexus car seat, that's what it looks like. "
"Ugly, very ugly. "
"This is what Dr. Gerba found on the cup holder in your SUV. This is the mold and thousands and thousands of bacteria. "
"I can't even look at the picture. "
"Where you in your drink ( Exactly, exactly )everyday. "
Is there anywhere he didn't find bacteria? "
Actually, the radio dials were quite clean. She is the only one who touches them. As for the rest of the car, Dr. Gerba says Debra, like the rest of us, should consider wiping down some parts with a disinfectant once a week.
"I'm going to wipe down this car as soon as you leave. "
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VOCABULARY
1. shuffle v 1:to mix in a disorderly mass 2: to rearrange the order of (cards in a pack) by mixing two parts of the pack together
2. piglet n: a small usu. young swine
3. crumb n. a small fragment.
4. raisin n. a grape dried for food.
5. bagel n. a firm doughnut-shaped roll usu. Made by boiling and then baking
6. sanitarium=SANATORIUM a health resort.
7. staph n: STAPHYLOCOCCUS: any of a genus of spherical bacteria including some pathogens of skin and mucous membranes.
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