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You know, there are a lot of germs hiding in your bathroom.

Well, maybe not exactly hiding.

They're on your toothbrush and showerhead.

I sort of thought that maybe there would be

more similarities between individual toothbrushes or between individual showerheads. And it turns out

that they're just a ton of new and different viruses in each sample. It's Wednesday, November 20th,

and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Charles Bergquist.

Researchers found viruses that they had never seen before when they took a close look at samples from ordinary bathrooms.

But fear not, these were bacteriophages, viruses that prey on bacteria and that could play a role as

antibacterials in medicine.

Here's Ira Flato, with more about bathroom biodiversity.

Joining me to talk about it is Dr. Erica Hartman, an associate professor in the Department

of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much for having me. Now, these are not something people should be scared of, right?

No, absolutely. Bacteriophage are viruses that infect bacteria. They absolutely do not infect people.

And while we are very interested in microbes from a human exposure standpoint,

we have no reason to think that any of these will actually make anyone sick.

Okay, that's good, good to start through. Yeah. Let's go through your study. You had people send in samples taken from their bathrooms. Why that place in particular? Yeah, so we're really

interested in built environments, you know,

our homes, our offices, those kinds of things for a couple of reasons. One is that it's where we,

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