A recent study of the Upper East Side confirms what some New Yorkers have long practiced: Take off your shoes before entering your home, or you risk carrying in a buttload of germs.
The study, which was recently published in the journal Indoor and Built Environment, shows the Upper East Side isn’t only home to museums and soon-to-be-demolished hot dog restaurants — but also approximately 31,000 fecal bacteria per travel-sized bottle of street puddle water.
A student and professor team from the neighborhood’s Marymount Manhattan College made this discovery by counting the number of enterococci bacteria in samples taken from sidewalks, carpets and uncarpeted floors around the small undergraduate campus. These intestinal microbes are considered “fecal indicator bacteria” — in other words, if you detect them in water or on a surface, someone or something has probably pooped there or carried poop there.
In addition to the sidewalk contamination, the pair of researchers found high concentrations of the fecal bacteria on student volunteers’ shoe soles and on carpets in highly trafficked areas. Uncarpeted floors and quieter parts of the campus, meanwhile, were markedly less disgusting.
Alessandra Leri, a chemistry professor at Marymount and the study's co-author, said the findings won’t surprise most New Yorkers. But they’re a strong argument for leaving your outside shoes at the door when you get home.
https://gothamist.com/news/poop-bacteria-rampant-on-upper-east-side-streets-nyc-study-findsLeads one to wonder if it is human or is it animal fecal matter?
