{"id":674,"date":"2013-06-07T10:28:14","date_gmt":"2013-06-07T10:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/?p=674"},"modified":"2013-06-07T10:28:15","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T10:28:15","slug":"the-curious-case-of-the-barbecue-and-the-toilet-seat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/2013\/06\/07\/the-curious-case-of-the-barbecue-and-the-toilet-seat\/","title":{"rendered":"The curious case of the barbecue and the toilet seat."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bbq<\/a><\/p>\n

The prospect of a weekend with some warmer weather sends us Brits in to a frenzy of outdoor eating. So, in this spirit, and ignoring the light rain, I went searching for our barbecue and found it under a pile of old flowerpots in the garden store. As I struggled to extract the barbecue from the tangle of pea sticks and garden tools, I noticed our neighbour watching me. I imagined he was admiring my skill as I flicked the rat droppings out of last year\u2019s spent charcoal. I soon found otherwise when he pointed to the rusting grill and said \u201cHave you seen the report?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat report?\u201d I answered.<\/p>\n

\u201cShowing that those things are dirtier than your toilet seat\u201d. As he said this, he stabbed the air with his finger in the general direction of the barbecue and backed away.<\/p>\n

\"Toilet<\/a><\/p>\n

It took me a while to regain my composure as he filled me in on some of the details of \u201cthe report\u201d.<\/p>\n

He had been reading an article in the Daily Mail: The average British barbecue contains TWICE as many germs as a toilet seat<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The article claims startling figures. According to the Mail, a barbecue harbours 1.7 million microbes per 100 cm2, making it the grubbiest surface in the garden. By comparison, a toilet seat has only 759,950 microbes per 100 cm2 (curious readers will want to know why this figure is quoted with so much precision). Also dirtier than toilet seats are bin lids with 1.2 million microbes per 100 cm2, posing a risk to householders when they put their rubbish out. The article continues helpfully to add that microbes in the garden include E. coli, salmonella and listeria, all of which can cause vomiting and diarrhoea. So, the message seems to be: keep out of your garden, it\u2019s one of the riskiest places around and certainly don\u2019t cook or eat there.<\/p>\n

But how did they get these figures for the numbers of microbes? It turns out that they were the work of Dr Lisa Ackerley, \u201cone of the UK\u2019s leading food safety experts\u201d. I assume Dr Lisa, as she likes to be called<\/a>, didn\u2019t do the legwork herself. I imagine she sent one of her minions to do the spying on people\u2019s barbecues and toilet seats. I have this image of a person with a clipboard kitted out with a white coat and rubber gloves turning up at someone\u2019s house and demanding to sample the microbes on toilet seats and barbecues. Yes, the householder says meekly, I would be happy for you come and swab my toilet and my barbecue; apparently 1400 householders agreed to undergo this intrusion.<\/p>\n

So far so good but, If you are a scientist, you now want to ask all sorts of silly questions. How was this work standardised, when was the barbecue (and the toilet) last used, how often are they cleaned, were any statistical tests done, and so on. Because actually this report is a load of rubbish and it\u2019s a disgrace that someone with a PhD associates themselves with such an article. I don\u2019t believe this kind of work tells us anything about food hygiene and it goes a long way to undermine confidence in science. Bacteria on the barbecue are unlikely to be a problem if you get it nice and hot and in my opinion, there is a far greater potential health risk from undercooked meat.<\/p>\n

But then you read another of Dr Lisa\u2019s statements where she stresses the potential dangers of the garden adding menacingly, \u201cUsing an appropriate disinfectant could significantly reduce the risks and lead to a healthier, safer outdoor experience for all\u201d. And suddenly you realise what is going on. The study was paid for by the disinfectant company, Jeyes and it\u2019s all really a sales promotion. So, if I douse my barbecue with Jeyes Fluid it will be safer. The meat will taste disgusting but we don\u2019t care about that.<\/p>\n

I keep asking myself how an article like this gets written. Do they just take the Press Release and add a few scary statements? I suppose they do but in this case they have also changed the facts slightly. Reading Dr Lisa\u2019s blog<\/a>, I find out that she didn\u2019t actually test barbecues, she tested barbecue preparation areas. The Mail has form<\/a> on this kind of fact-changing and it\u2019s very misleading.<\/p>\n

But why does the Mail choose to publish this pseudo-scientific guff? I don\u2019t believe that it\u2019s just careless journalism; I think they are out to unsettle their readers and to undermine their trust in science. The toilet seat\/barbecue article is just part of a wider project in the Mail to rank the dirt on various items. Their reference in this project is the toilet seat (should we call this the bog standard?) and they claim that carpets, computer keyboards, kitchen sinks, kitchen sponges and mobile phones are all dirtier than toilets. You could worry about this and fanatically clean the dirty items or you could just shrug your shoulders and get on with life.<\/p>\n

If, as a Daily Mail reader, you spend time worrying about the cleanliness of your barbecue (or mobile phone etc), it means that you don\u2019t spend time worrying about more important issues like politics or world affairs. Depending on your point of view, this is either a form of therapy or a form of brainwashing.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the reader who dismisses the findings may well be acting sensibly. The Mail, however, publishes a lot of these pseudoscience articles dressed up with dubious statistics and gravitas supplied by a named scientist. A problem then arises if this is your only contact with science and scientists. You may end up dismissing most of their utterances and you may come to mistrust both science and scientists; but perhaps that\u2019s what the Mail wants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The prospect of a weekend with some warmer weather sends us Brits in to a frenzy of outdoor eating. So, in this spirit, and ignoring the light rain, I went searching for our barbecue and found it under a pile … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,20,1],"tags":[174,175,177,176,178],"class_list":["post-674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fun","category-guestposts","category-uncategorized","tag-daily-mail","tag-hygeine","tag-misleading","tag-poor-journalism","tag-pseudoscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/153"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/irregulars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}