Your phone is seven times dirtier than your toilet - new study

Your phone is dirtier than your toilet! Photo / 123RF

You're probably going to want to bathe in bleach after reading this, because a new study has found out just how dirty your mobile phone is.

The average mobile phone is almost seven times dirtier than a toilet seat.

Just let that sink in.

Think your phone case protects it? Nope. Turns out phones in leather cases harbour the most bacteria and even phones with those wipe-clean plastic cases have more than six times the amount of terms found on a toilet seat.

A company called Initial Washroom Hygiene took swab samples from smartphones using a device which lights up live microbes.

A toilet seat scanned this way shows up 220 bright spots. The average mobile phone had 1479.

According to the Daily Mail, Professor Hugh Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, said: "Swabbing a smartphone is almost like checking your handkerchief for germs - you are likely to find them because of the close physical contact you have with this device several times a day.

"There will be norovirus on phones at this time of year but the bugs on smartphones will probably be people's own bacteria so the likelihood of passing on disease is low. However it might be ill-advised to pass smartphones around between people."

The highest bacteria reading was for a smartphone in a leather case which doubled as a wallet - it showed up almost 17 times the amount of bacteria on a toilet seat.

Experts believe phones become so dirty because they are taken into the bathroom, so are exposed to the same germs as door handles and toilet seats.