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Doctors' Neckties Transmit Germs
bzipitidoo writes "Real geeks don't wear neckties, and maybe the rest of the world wishes they didn't have to. Ties had a minor comeback with the recent bad job market, but hopefully that's behind us. Apart from the obvious that neckties are uncomfortable, useless, in-the-way, and therefore a waste of time and money, too-tight ties constrict blood vessels and
raise eye fluid pressure which increases the risk of blindness. Now there's a new study showing that
doctors' neckties transmit germs. One suggested remedy from the article is tie condoms."
They do. I took a microbio class in college and one assignment was to take a swab of some object in everyday use and see what grows on a petri dish. Well, I chose the pen at the sign-in clipboard to the infermery. When we were looking at the slides we prepared from our cultures, my prof asked me what I had sampled. When I told her she became very upset, especially when she looked at my slide and saw many gram-negative cocci, of which she was afraid that I had grown meningitis. My culture was promptly destroyed.