Can You Get a Disease From a Toilet Seat?

The world is filled with disgusting toilets . You might personally prefer toilet that smell okay and are n’t get across in vulgarism , but try tell that to whichever electric organ are involved in making you really need to use the bath . It has happened before , and it will happen again : you ’ll be at a public bus station , or a medicine fete , or the flat of a world under the years of 26 , and you ’ll pull in , suddenly , that you no longer have any choice .

Of course , horrific viral contagion - carriers are n’t always seeable to the bare eye ( or feelable by the naked ass ) . All toilets , even the clean one , are by definition unsanitary . But , clean - seeming or visibly grime - cake , the interrogation remains : is there anything to actually be apprehensive about ? That is , can toilets actually convey disease , or is the worst - case - scenario here just experience kind of gross ? And if they can , then what diseases , specifically ?

For this week’sGiz enquire , we reached out to a act of experts in microbiology and immunology for help in answering those questions . The odds of break / getting sick from the faulty pot are slender , we see , but it is definitely possible — and you should probably keep your toilet clean irrespective .

Illustration: Sam Woolley (Gizmodo)

William Dampier

Assistant Professor , Microbiology & Immunology , Drexel University

For a healthy mortal , the likeliness of actually getting a disease from a gutter buttocks is pretty small . Your skin has a portion of barrier against things from the outside , and is pretty good at keeping out bacteria . If you had some sort of infection or foolhardy already , you could probably get a staph infection or something like that , but you would have to already have some variety of intermission in the skin for that to happen . I do n’t desire to say it ’s unacceptable — it ’s possible — but I think the likeliness that any given sit on a toilet posterior will result in an infection is probably very small .

I could see if you had a very cheating toilet seat , you could potentially get a staph contagion , and there are staph infection nowadays that are tolerant to antibiotics . But those tend to be found in hospitals , not in the wild .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

The only causa I ’ve interpret [ call for someone getting a disease from a toilet ass ] were middleman - dermatitis type things , and that ’s usually in children , where they ’re deliver some variety of allergic reaction or diaper rash that gets miffed by either the charge card or the cleaning fluid that ’s used . But that ’s also not specially common , and mass get out of it somewhat speedily . At least in the case discipline , I have n’t ’ seen any instance of somebody touch [ an infection ] from a can tail end , and that is the type of affair that somebody would write up as a case written report . I ’d take the want of evidence there as grounds of it not really pass off .

Vincent Racaniello

Higgins Professor , Microbiology and Immunology , Columbia University

I would say that posture on a toilet can get you a serious E. coli urinary tract infection . E. coli are normal inhabitants of our intestinal pathway , but some pains can have urinary tract infection and some can spread into other tissues beyond the urinary tract . The job is that fecal contamination of the urinary piece of land is frequent due to the proximity of these systems . It is far more vulgar in women than men for anatomical reason : the urethra is shorter in womanhood than in man , make it easier for the bacteria to get to the bladder . In men piddle is more potential to crimson out the bacteria . This change as men age when their incidence of urinary tract infection resurrect .

Here is a story colligate to me by Dr. James Johnson duringan interviewI conducted with him : An elderly man was hospitalized with a serious urinary tract transmission make by E. coli that involved his kidneys . His daughter call in him in the hospital , used the toilet in his elbow room , and some time afterwards she developed a urinary tract contagion which involved her kidney , and moderate to her hospital care . Lab analysis bring out that she had been infect with the same strain of E. coli as her Father-God ! The likely scenario is that the toilet rear was contaminated with her father ’s urine turn back the bacteria , which she then picked up from the tush or perhaps even the water .

William Duplessie

It ’s a good thought to wipe down the toilet seat with a sanitizer but that still leaves the water system , which can be pollute and which might splash up on you . And do n’t leave that the toilet bring forth an aerosol when flushed , and the aerosol can be inhale . Despite these hazards , the toilet is still one of the groovy inventions of humanity , allow us to get off countless contagion induce by the old pattern of dumping our excrement into the street .

Laura Kasman

Associate Professor , Microbiology and Immunology , Medical University of South Carolina

Theoretically , yes , but it would be really unlikely . If you had an open cut or painful on your hind end that touched the seat , and someone not too long before you had an infection that touched the seat in the same place as your slash or tender , then yes , you could entrance the contagion . The most likely culprit would be Staph bacteria , human papillomaviruses that get warts , or herpes simplex .

One solution : Sit on your hands so they are between your bottom and the seat , and then wash them really well with soap before you leave the can . ( You should launder them very well anyway . ) Works for insensate seats too !

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