It's official - men really are more dirty than women. One in four men don't wash their hands after using the toilet, compared with one out of ten women, according to figures from the American Society for Microbiology, writes David Fickling
It's enough to make you think twice about shaking hands quite so readily. Tellingly, when researchers interviewed people over the phone, only 3% or 4% of them owned up to their filthy habits.
To get around this problem, the fearless academics had to sneak around in toilets watching where people put their hands.
We've all heard the hoary tale about how DNA testing of snacks on pub bars reveals traces of the urine of dozens of men who've plunged their mucky fingers into the bowl.
There's precious little evidence of such a study ever being done, but why let the facts get in the way of a good story? Urban legend site Snopes has a discussion of a similar horror story about urine being found on after-dinner mints.
For men resolving to mark Clean Hands Week by turning over a new leaf, help is out there.
A British government food safety site gives you advice about which bits of the hand most commonly go unwashed, as well as a few stomach-churning facts about what's hanging around on your fingers. Apparently, the ring on your pinkie could be sheltering as many germs as there are people in Europe.
However, really determined hygienists should be browsing this academic paper, which offers a step-by-step guide to the Rolls-Royce of handwashes, the double wash procedure.
You should be using a fingernail brush and cleaning up your wrists - and don't even think about using that blow dryer: supposedly it accumulates "organisms from toilet aerosols". Ugh.
You can give yourself a real scare by looking at a rundown of the sort of bacteria that can be found on the human body at normal times, but some scientists are taking the paradoxical view that too much hygiene is bad for your health.
Their argument is that we need exposure to germs to build up our immune systems, but a conference in India several years ago took things to a more extreme level by advocating the positive health benefits of urine.
It seems "urine therapy" is relatively common. India's former prime minister Morarji Desai drank a glass every morning, as does the actress Sarah Miles, and even egghead ambient pioneer Brian Eno tried it once. Can it be a coincidence that his first album was titled Here Come the Warm Jets?
