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STUDY: Uber and Lyft cars are dirtier than taxis, rentals, and even toilet seats

If you take a ride via a ride-hailing app like Uber or Lyft, you might want to carry hand sanitizer. Insurance-shopping website NetQuote swabbed surfaces from three ride-share vehicles, and three rental cars. The ride-share vehicles had over 6,000,000 colony-forming units per square-inch (CFU), while the rental cars had jut over 2,000,000.

A colony-forming unit is “the number of viable bacteria cells present in a sample.” To get some perspective, toilet seats swabbed in the study had just over 170 CFU. Among the ride-share vehicles, the window buttons had the most bacteria, while in rental cars gear-shifts had the most bacteria. Also, ride-share vehicles had the highest proportion of bacillus germs, which can cause infections and food poisoning.

Business Insider

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