Front Doors Carry ‘Thin Patina’ of Poop Bacteria
First, just let me say “YUUUUUCK!”
This matches up pretty well with my mental map of where the feedlots and factory ranches and farms are.
This image might have you thinking twice before knocking.
A new map called “The Patina of Feces” shows that the outer door frames of American homes wear a thin veneer of microbes that are normally found in animals’ guts. Given that the microbes had to leave those guts to travel door to door, they probably came from someone’s, or something’s, poop.
“No reason to freak out,” says project coleader Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado Boulder. We already knew that fecal bacteria are floating around in the air, and we know that we’re breathing them in all the time. They probably aren’t causing any health effects, for the most part.
One does wonder, though, about those hot spots, shown appropriately in brown. Fierer and his colleagues are still trying to figure out why doors in some places, notably north Texas, Arkansas and Missouri, have so much fecal matter. “Our current hypothesis is that these patterns are driven by proximity to livestock and, in part, by climate parameters,” Fierer says. Dry, windy places may have more fecal-laden dust moving around.
About 1,000 houses were sampled for the map, and almost all of them had some level of fecal bacteria. But the team still has a lot of work to do to figure out where the bacteria came from and whether the hot spots are real. The Texas panhandle, for example, may or may not be particularly poopy based on the two houses sampled. (No comment.)