Whenever you withdraw money from an automated teller machine, the A.T.M. deposits microbes onto you.
That shouldn’t be surprising because germs and bacteria are everywhere: on doorknobs, subway seats, staircases, your cat, your dog, your face. You can’t avoid them, especially when you’re punching in your pin.
Researchers in New York City swabbed the keypads of 66 A.T.M.s at banks, bodegas and other places across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. They found that A.T.M.s are mostly covered in microbes from human skin, similar to the ones found in bathrooms, on pillowcases and on televisions.
“New Yorkers love their food, it’s not that surprising,” said Jane Carlton, an urban microbiology ecologist from New York University and an author of the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal mSphere. She added that the microbes they found were pretty consistent across boroughs and stressed that the majority of the microbes they found were harmless. Gross, perhaps, but mostly harmless.
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