Prepare for a year's worth of office gag material.
For many of us, nipping to the office kitchen for a quick cuppa is a sacred and healing part of our day. It offers a break away from screens, a moment for chitchat and - crucially - an opportunity to enjoy a cup of reviving tea, tannin-laden nectar that it is.
Sadly, it seems that nothing is sacred, not even tea. A recent study by Initial Washroom Hygiene, published in Cosmo magazine, revealed that office teabags contain more bacteria than a toilet seat - 17 times more, to be more specific.
A toilet seat typically clocks in at 220 bacterial readings, whereas a teabag found in an office kitchen has 3,785 germs.
For comparison, your phone screen - which your hair, hands and face touch every day - has only four times as much bacteria as a toilet seat, and as most of that bacteria is likely your own, it's less likely to make you ill. The countless types of germs found in your office kitchen, however, aren't so local to you.
To make matters worse, it seems the whole tea-making enterprise is a filthy one: kettle handles were found to have 2,483 germs, mug rims clocked in with 1,746 and fridge door handles have 1,592. While upsetting, this makes perfect logical sense: naturally, germs will be passed from item to item as we use them.
‘If you stop to think about the number of different hands that touch things such as the kettle handle, tea bag box lid, mugs, and so on, the potential for cross contamination really adds up,’ says Dr Peter Barrett of Initial Washroom Hygiene.
If you're looking for a last-ditch New Year's resolution, perhaps being one of those people who carries hand sanitizer is your new look.
