Beware the lemon wedge: Ordering a lemon wedge for your water or soda may be hazardous to your health or at least gross you out.

The bad:

• researchers swabbed the rinds and flesh of 76 lemons from 21 restaurants collected during 43 visits
• 70%of them produced microbial growth
• Several of the types of bacteria are known to cause human disease

The good:

• lemons have known antimicrobial properties
• The study was done in 2007 and has not be replicated
• You can make yourself feel better by assuming things have changed for the better.

You’re better off staying home: the average hotel room may be teaming with grossness

The bad:

• hotel bathrooms in one study had between 320,007 colony-forming units (CFU) to 2,534,773 CFU per square-inch (the average household bathroom had 452 bacteria per square inch)
• hotel remotes, had 232,733 CFU per square-inch- 2,002,300 CFU per square-inch. (the average household remote has a bacteria count of 17,000 per square inch)
• Sheets are swapped out, and so are pillow cases. But some hotels don’t bother to change their comforters.
• The couch: Think about all the things that can happen on a couch, and then think about all the times you’ve ever actually washed a couch.
• One report, by ABC News, found urine stains in every single roomthey sampled regardless of a hotel’s price or rating.

The good:

• if you’re reasonably healthy or not too young or too old, chances are your body does a good job of fighting off nasty bacteria on its own.
• “Simple things like washing your hands can really take away the worry.
• most bacteria are in areas that are very easy to wipe with one of those disinfectant wipes or using hand sanitizer.”
• Remember there is bacteria everywhere you go.”

Feel a Sneeze coming on?

The bad:

• When you cough or sneeze, you see the droplets, (or feel them if someone sneezes on you)
• what you don’t see is the cloud of smaller particles that can travel five to 200 times further than those droplets
• The cloud of small droplets from a sneeze can travel up to 26 ft (8m) for for a sneeze and up to 20 ft (6m) for a cough.
• depending on the environmental conditions, droplets can hang around in the air for up to 10 minutes

The good:

• You can prevent the spread of your germs by covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze
• Use the inside of your elbow which you are less likely to use to touch something else later

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qqHOKUXY5U

What’s between your sheets?

The bad:

• A 2014 surveyed one in ten people admitted that they used the same sheets for an entire month, about 35% of all adults regularly go two weeks without washing their sheets, only one third of the participants claimed to wash their sheets on a weekly basis.
• Bed sheets and pillows have skin cells, bacteria, animal dander, pollen, soil, lint, finishing agents of whatever the sheets are made from, coloring material, spores of fungi, all the body fluids including sweat, sputum and others…

The good:

• Your immune system protects you from getting sick from most of these
• Washing your linens once weekly will keep critter growth to a minimum

And then there is “Defect Levels Handbook.” 

Food and Drug Administration (FDA) establishes Levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans

• They set limits for naturally occurring contaminants that are unaesthetic but in most cases not hazards to public health. When these levels are exceeded, FDA can and will take regulatory action.
• Levels are specific to a food or ingredient. For example

Some Fun definitions from the handbook

“WHOLE OR EQUIVALENT INSECT: A whole insect, separate head, or body portions with head attached.

COPEPODS: Small free-swimming marine crustaceans, many of which are fish parasites. In some species the females enter the tissues of the host fish and may form pus pockets.

DAMAGE: Refers to the condition of the product which shows the evidence of the pest habitation or feeding, (e.g., tunneling, gnawing, egg cases, etc.).

INFESTATION: The presence of any live or dead life cycle stages of insects in a host product, (e.g., weevils in pecans, fly eggs and maggots in tomato products); or evidence of their presence (i.e., excreta, cast skins, chewed product residues, urine, etc.); or the establishment of an active breeding population, (e.g., rodents in a grain silo). “

https://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/SanitationTransportation/ucm056174.htm#CHPTD