New York's subway is way, way dirtier than you think

You'll definitely want to grab the nearest bottle of Purell after reading this new study from Travelmath.

The travel logistics site sent teams to five major cities to gather bacteria samples from the handrails of public transportation systems. While most of cities turned out to be surprisingly clean, NYC definitely, definitely did not.

Just how dirty is the subway? Measured in "colony-forming units" per square inch NYC finished at the front of the pack of the filthy five. San Francisco's trains had 483 CFU, Boston's had 10 CFU, Chicago's had 180 CFU, Washington's had 30 CFU and New York City had 2,000,030 CFU. 

I'm sorry, what?

Yep, the subway had far more bacteria than any of the other cities combined. In fact, the subway's handrails had 900x more germs than an airplane table. Touching one is equivalent to shaking hands with 10,000 people.

But hey, at least we've got to be immune to pretty much everything by now, right? Right? Just trying to see the positives here.

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