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Most of us use our cell phones in the bathroom. Health experts say it's a big no-no.

It's not just about the germs.

Photo credit: Canva

A significant majority of people admit to using their phones on the toilet.

If you're reading this article on the toilet (no judgment), chances are you're not alone. According to a NordVPN survey of 10 countries, somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of us have a habit of using our phones in the bathroom. Another survey found that people ages 18 to 29 use their phones on the toilet a whopping 93% of the time. That means there’s a whole lot of throne scrolling happening, and probably a lot of denial that it’s happening as well.

After all, bathrooms aren’t exactly sanitary. Most of us can deduce that having a phone anywhere near a flushing toilet is likely to contaminate it with bacteria we don’t really want to swipe onto our fingers. Ew.

Experts say the bacteria-spreading potential of using your phone in the loo is a big reason to break the habit, but it’s by no means the only one.

First, yes, bacteria gets on your phone

Is it really that much of a risk to use your phone the bathroom? Most of us do it and seem fine, don’t we?

Let's put it this way. You wouldn't willingly swipe your finger around a toilet rim, right? Scientists at the University of Arizona have found that cell phones carry 10 times more bacteria than most toilet seats, and bringing our phones into the bathroom certainly doesn't help. Our immune systems can handle a lot, but we're still exposing ourselves unnecessarily to potentially harmful bacteria such as salmonella, E. Coli and C. Difficile when we use our phones in the bathroom (or when we use the toilet and don't wash our hands afterward).

via GIPHY

There are ways to minimize how germy your phone gets in the bathroom, such as paying close attention to what the phone is touching and what your hands are doing before you touch your phone. Closing the lid when you flush helps some, too.

Better yet, leave the phone when you gotta go, always wash your hands, and wipe down your phone with alcohol regularly. Simple, but so important.

Second, scrolling can make you spend too long on the toilet

This may not seem like a problem, but it is. Sitting on a toilet isn’t like sitting on a chair. Experts say you should spend no more than 10 minutes on the toilet to do your business, and preferably much less time than that.

“First, using your phone while doing number two can lead to prolonged sitting on the toilet, which can cause strain and pressure on your rectum and anus,” gastroenterologist Dr. Saurabh Sethi explained in a video. “This can lead to issues such as hemorrhoids, anal fissures and rectal prolapse.”

Yikes. We all know how easy it is to lose track of time when we're on our phones. When we're alone in the bathroom with nothing to distract us from our scrolling, it's even easier.

Sitting too long on the toilet can cause uncomfortable problems.Photo credit: Canva

Third, the phone addiction thing

In reality, it shouldn't be too hard for us to leave our phone behind for a few minutes to use the toilet. If we always feel the need to bring our phone with us into the bathroom, what does that say about our phone habits?

I'm not saying that everyone who uses their phone on the toilet is a phone addict, but there's a good chance we're not being as mindful as we probably should be about our phone use if we automatically whip it out on the toilet. And since nearly 57% of Americans say they are addicted to their phones, maybe setting a boundary for bathroom use is a good first step toward addressing the issue.

Finally, phones do occasionally take a toilet plunge

Dropping your phone into the toilet might sound like a joke, but it happens more often than you'd think. As of 2014, around 1 in 5 Americans had dropped their phone in the toilet. Considering how much phone usage has increased since then, it's doubtful that number has gone down.

via GIPHY

Whether it falls out of your back pocket when you pull your pants down or it just inexplicably slips from your fingers, dropping a phone in a toilet is not fun. You can imagine the various scenarios that would make it particularly bad, but even if it takes a plunge before you actually use the toilet, it's still a nightmare scenario. Nobody wants to fish a phone out of a toilet and try to figure out how to sanitize it. Not good for the phone, not good for you, not good for anyone. You can avoid the possibility completely by just not bringing the thing into the bathroom in the first place.

Habits die hard, but having solid reasons for wanting to change can be motivating. If you've been feeling iffy about bringing your phone to the toilet with you, see this as a sign to break that habit sooner than later. (Especially if you really are reading this on the throne.)

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Old saris have a second use: They can protect people from a deadly bacteria in water.

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For many of us here in the U.S., cholera is something we only know about from a book that we read in high school.

But for millions of people around the world, this disease is a very real threat to their health simply because they don't have access to clean drinking water.

So, what if there were an easy way to filter out cholera-causing bacteria from water?

Image via iStock.

That is exactly the question that marine microbiologist Rita Colwell pondered while she was on a research trip in Bangladesh.

She had been studying the bacterium that causes cholera, called Vibrio cholerae, for decades and had made a series of important discoveries about it with her colleagues. For example, they had learned the bacteria could survive in both fresh- and seawater and that it was the primary bacteria attached to copepods, microscopic crustaceans and plankton that live in water all over the world.

But up until then, their research had focused mostly on the bacteria and the environment where it was found — not on any practical solutions that might help people not get sick.

"It occurred to us, well, my goodness, in all the work we are doing, clearly we could do something for the village families who get cholera," Colwell says.

An electron microscope image of V. cholerae bacteria, which causes cholera. Image via Dartmouth University/Wikimedia Commons.

Cholera is a deadly diarrheal disease caused by the ingestion of contaminated food or water.

While this disease has been rare in the United States for over a century, it is still a serious problem throughout the developing world, including in Bangladesh, where access to clean drinking water can be difficult. In fact, according to the World Health Organization,between 1.3 to 4 million people get sick with cholera every year, and as many as 143,000 people die from it.

In rural Bangladesh, where Colwell was working, cholera was a serious problem because women would scoop drinking surface water directly from canals, rivers, and lakes. There was no filtration, and there wasn’t enough fuel, like firewood, available for families to boil water every day.

Colwell and her colleagues realized that if they could devise a crude, inexpensive filter to strain the copepods (which the V. cholerae bacteria are attached to) from the water, maybe they could help people protect themselves from the disease.

They started by testing out T-shirt material, but that didn’t work. It was difficult to rinse, it didn’t dry, and a lot of debris in the water got through the weave in the fabric.

Then they tried sari cloth —the same cloth that women in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal have worn for thousands of years. It's also a cloth that women in rural Bangladesh already were using to prepare home-brewed drinks.

Sari cloth has been used as traditional clothing for centuries in the region. Image via iStock.

It worked.

The sari fabric, when it was folded four times over the urns used to gather water, created a mesh filter that was effective enough to remove 99% of the bacteria attached to the plankton copepods that cause the cholera.

Not only that, but the cloth could be reused over and over again, making it a very practical and inexpensive solution. That’s because the cloth is light and porous, Colwell explains. "Because it rains — with monsoons — every day [there], the sari cloth is designed to dry quickly. So, what is nice about it is that you can unfold it, rinse it off, and then hang it up. It dries and then you can re-use it."

Colwell and her colleagues taught villagers how to make their own sari filters in 65 rural Bangladeshi villages, and over three years, she says, "we were able to show a 50% reduction in cholera."

Folded four times over a water collection urn, sari cloth can reduce the amount of cholera in drinking water. Image via iStock.

The team returned to the villages five years later and found that news of the filters had spread to other villages. As many as 75% of the population in these villages were using these filters.

And, Colwell says, they discovered something called the "herd effect" taking place — even if villagers weren’t filtering water themselves, fewer people were getting sick because fewer people were shedding the bacteria back into the water. "By virtue of all their neighbors staying healthy because they filtered," she explains, "they were not exposed to the larger numbers of bacteria themselves."

Of course, the filter isn't 100% effective at catching cholera-causing bacteria. Still, Colwell says there is power in this simple solution.

According to UNICEF, 663 million people do not have access to clean water around the world. Not only that, almost 2.4 billion people do not have access to adequate sanitation.

There are a lot of high-tech solutions out there that try to address the problem of access to clean water, she says, and there are a lot of ways to work to combat the spread of cholera. But sometimes, it is the simple, inexpensive solutions — such as the sari filter — that can do a lot of good.

A view of rural Bangladesh. Image via Balaram Mahalder/Wikimedia Commons.

With more education about how the sari can be used, she says, it can make a difference for public health in regions where there isn’t access to clean water. Sari filters could even be useful in the aftermaths of large hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters all over the world, she adds.

Colwell and her colleagues hope to spread the word about sari filters to other places, such as Africa and other regions in Asia, where inexpensive solutions have the potential to make a big impact.

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Women were dying from childbirth at hospitals. This 19th-century doctor figured out why.

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Today, we know that washing our hands is one of the most important steps we can take to avoid getting sick and spreading germs.

But how we came to know that is pretty fascinating.

Image via iStock.

Handwashing is actually a relatively new practice — even for doctors.

In fact, one of the first doctors to realize how important handwashing could be — Ignaz Semmelweis — didn’t discover this fact until 1847. And even after he did realize it, the battle to convince the rest of the medical community wasn’t easy.

The 19th century has been described by some historians as “a golden age of the physician and scientist” because for the first time, doctors were expected to have scientific training.

They were also expected to use symptom-based diagnoses to solve medical ailments. And to do this, of course, medicine relied on understanding what was happening inside the human body to get at the root of disease.

So, autopsies became all the rage.

Not only did they form a critical part of a doctor’s training, but the doctors who regularly performed them were the most respected in the medical community. An unfortunate byproduct of this, though, was the erroneous belief that the dirtier the doctor, the better the doctor.

In fact, there are accounts of doctors going directly from their last autopsy to deliver a baby or treat a patient without changing their clothes.

Enter Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis.

A portrait of Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis. Image via Jeño Doby/Wikimedia Commons.

In 1846, Semmelweis had just started his new job at the maternity clinic at Vienna General Hospital.

At that time, women were dying at staggering rates in hospitals shortly after giving birth from “childbed fever,” a disease also called puerperal fever. It was a cruel infection, causing raging fevers, painful abscesses, an infection in the uterus and birth canal, sepsis, and then finally, death — all within about three days of the baby’s delivery. And it was the single most common cause of maternal death at the time.

Being a man of science, Semmelweis wanted to understand why so many women were dying in his clinic. So he studied two maternity wards in the hospital — one staffed by doctors and medical students, the other by midwives — and recorded the number of deaths in each ward.

Vienna General Hospital, where Semmelweis worked. Image via Josef & Peter Schafer/Wikimedia Commons.

His results showed that women died at a rate nearly five times higher in the ward staffed by doctors and medical students.

But it wasn’t until one of his colleagues, a pathologist, got sick and died after pricking his finger in an autopsy of someone who had died from childbed fever that Semmelweis realized that anyone, not just mothers, could get sick from puerperal fever, and the reason the midwives' ward had fewer deaths was because they didn't do autopsies.

He theorized that there must be some “cadaverous particles” or “morbid poison” that doctors were getting on their hands during autopsies. And the doctors in the ward were then transferring these particles inside the women when they delivered the baby, which then made the women sick.

Today, these “cadaverous particles” are known as bacteria, such as streptococcus pyogenes.

A photomicrograph of streptococcus pyogenes bacteria, which causes puerperal fever. Image via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Wikimedia Commons.

Semmelweis immediately ordered the medical staff to start cleaning their hands and instruments before delivering babies.

They were told to use a chlorine lime solution, not soap, until they could no longer smell the bodies they had dissected.

And it worked — chlorine is actually a great disinfectant. The rate of puerperal fever fell drastically in the doctor’s ward.

The first edition of Semmelweis' published findings. Image via István Benedek/Wikimedia Commons.

Unfortunately, the Semmelweis' colleagues did not embrace his findings — they were outraged at the suggestion that they were the cause of their patients' deaths. Semmelweis was fired from the hospital and eventually committed to an asylum. He died at the asylum two weeks later. (Several historians believe that he died, after being beaten at the asylum, from sepsis — an infection in the bloodstream caused by germs.)

It would take about 20 years before his ideas would start to be accepted by the medical community. And even then, it was "germ theory" — and the work of Louis Pasteur in the late-1860s — that really convinced anyone of the importance of hygiene and handwashing.

Over a 150 years later, though, Semmelweis is finally getting the recognition he deserves because the simple act of handwashing is one of the most important tools we have in public health.

And its benefits extend well beyond the hospital. Washing your hands reduces the chances of getting diarrheal illnesses by 31%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It also reduces the occurrence of respiratory illnesses — including colds — by 16 to 21%.

That’s why in the 1980s, the first nationally endorsed hand hygiene guidelines were released by the CDC, after a series of outbreaks of food-borne and health care-associated infections. And over the next few decades, a number of other guidelines have followed to stress the importance to the general public.

Image via iStock.

Today, the battle to promote this public health tool is still not over.

Diarrhea and respiratory infections remain leading causes of death in the developing world — claiming about 3.5 million children every year — because people either don't know how important handwashing is or don't have access to a reliable, clean water source. There are also still over 1.4 million cases of health care-associated infections around the world. But through education initiatives, NGOs all over the world are hoping to bring about change with this one simple habit.

Proper hand hygiene is still one of the best ways to fight these infections and diseases — and we have Dr. Semmelweis to thank.

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It looks like a takeout container, but it might be our best bet to fight Zika.

An innovative approach to battling Zika you should know about.

Soon, the solution to Zika could arrive in something as simple as a takeout box.

Image from Recode/YouTube.

For the past several years, researchers in Australia have been at work trying to develop a way to put a stop to dengue, a virus that — like Zika — is spread by way of a certain breed of mosquitoes.

The result is what's called a Mozzie Box, and Susan Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recently demonstrated how it works.

The Mozzie Box works by intentionally breeding disease carrying mosquitos, with a twist.

In the Mozzie Box, Aedes mosquitoes — the same kind that transmit diseases like Zika, dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, and more — are bred.

And how exactly is breeding more mosquitoes the solution to a mosquito-borne illness?

The Mozzie Box mosquito eggs contain a bacteria called Wolbachia, which renders the grown mosquitoes essentially harmless (minus a few itchy bites here and there).

In other words:

GIFs from Recode/YouTube.

When the Mozzie Box mosquitoes fly off into the wild and begin mating, the Wolbachia bacteria is transmitted to their offspring.

That bacteria will then be passed down to future generations.

As time goes on, fewer mosquitoes will have the capability to carry Zika (or those other diseases), and the virus will become much less of an issue.

There are times when science can be so freaking cool, and this is definitely one of them.

The key to stopping Zika might lie in mosquito STDs. How cool is that?

But why is it so important to take steps like these? For one:

The 2016 Summer Olympics are scheduled to take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, one of the areas hit hardest by Zika.

A number of athletes, such as Spanish basketball star Pau Gasol, have expressed concern over the virus and are considering skipping the games.

Despite the worry, the World Health Organization has advised against cancelling or moving the Olympics, writing, "Based on the current assessment of Zika virus circulating in almost 60 countries globally and 39 countries in the Americas, there is no public health justification for postponing or cancelling the games."

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images.

So even though the Olympics may go on as planned, that doesn't make the virus any less worrisome for the world as a whole.

The virus has been connected with birth defects in children and possible neurological problems in adults.

The most common concern is that mothers who contract Zika may give birth to babies with microcephaly, a condition where a baby is born with a much smaller head than expected.

A mother holds a 3-month-old girl with microcephaly. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images.

Help from governments sometimes seems out of reach, making finding a solution in the private sector that much more important.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Tom Frieden delivered an emotional call to the U.S. Congress, pleading for them to take the threat of Zika seriously.

"Imagine that you’re standing by and you see someone drowning, and you have the ability to stop them from drowning, but you can’t," Frieden said. "Now multiply that by 1,000 or 100,000. That’s what it feels like to know how to change the course of an epidemic and not be able to do it."

Frieden speaks about the Zika crisis on May 26, 2016, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Maybe Mozzie Boxes will help bring an end to Zika and other dangerous diseases. Maybe they'll inspire others to take up important innovative work. Maybe they'll help make the world a better place, now and for future generations.

There's already been so much progress in how we treat, prevent, and test for dangerous diseases. Here's hoping that such innovation continues.

You can watch Susan Desmond-Hellmann's Mozzie Box demonstration below:

Want to do everything possible to protect yourself from disease? Grow a beard.

Think beards are dirty? This new research proves you couldn’t be more wrong.

Babyfaces be warned: We are entering the long-overdue era of the beard — a Beardaissance, if you will.

So. Freakin’. Classy. Image from Incredibeard, used with permission.

Yes, that’s right: It would appear that beards are making a bit of a comeback. They’re on our televisions. They’re in our bedrooms. Heck, we’ve even devoted an entire month of the year to them! The fact that Grizzly Adams was able to witness the Rise of the Beard before passing is easily one of the greatest social justices ever to be carried out.

Just imagine the secrets this beard must hold. Photo via iStock.

But did you know that, aside from protecting you from sunburn, keeping you warm in the winter, and saving a few remnants of that absolutely divine T-bone steak you had for dinner, a beard can actually improve your health?

Yes, it's true: Growing a beard can aid in fending off several varieties of diseases, according to a recent study published on BBC News.

Seeking to crush the age-old stereotype that beards are bug-infested bacteria gardens donned by only the most unhygienic among us were the folks at Trust Me, I’m a Doctor, Dr. Chris van Tulleken, Dr. Saleyha Ashan, and Dr. Michael Mosley.

First, their team revisited a study published in the Journal of Hospital Infection last year, which looked at whether bearded hospital workers were more likely to carry (and pass on) preventable and potentially fatal infections than their smooth-shaven counterparts.

The results of the study, surprisingly, found that bearded employees were three times less likely to be carrying MRSA, a common methicillin-resistant infection.

GIF from "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy."

Why? That’s the part researchers aren't so sure about. The authors of the study guessed that the micro-abrasions and cuts caused by shaving often served as target sites for these infections to breed. Trust Me, I’m a Doctor had a different theory: Our beards actually fight infection.

So van Tulleken (of Trust me, I’m a Doctor) took over the case. He swabbed the beards of 20 random men, then shipped the samples off to be tested by Dr. Adam Roberts, a microbiologist based at University College London. From those 20 samples, Roberts was able to grow over 100 types of bacteria.

Beards actually are bacteria gardens, after all, but in a life-saving way!

Two reasons to smile: Awesome beard. No MRSA. Photo via iStock.

“When you get a competitive environment like a beard where there are many different bacteria, they fight for food resources and space, so they produce things like antibiotics," Roberts said in an episode of Trust Me, I’m a Doctor.

Just as penicillin was created by fungus, it turns out that the bacteria in beards are actually the first line of defense against major diseases.

One of these badass beard bacteria "healers" goes by the name of Staphylococcus epidermidis.

Roberts found that it attacked and eradicated a form of drug-resistant E. coli during testing. With the rate of deaths due to antibiotic-resistant infections rising by the year, Roberts is hoping that this whiskery revelation will be a major breakthrough.

In fact, after Roberts’ research was published on BBC.com in January, the public began sending him their own samples of stubble for testing. And, believe it or not, his team was able to extract “anti-adhesion molecules” that, when added to toothpaste and mouthwash, could stop acid-producing bacteria from binding to our enamel.

You know what this means, don’t you? ZZ Top are going to live forever!

Photo by Ander Gillenea/AFP/Getty Images.

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A color-changing bandage may just change how we treat infections.

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In the United States, more than 300 kids end up in the hospital for burn injuries every day.

Antibiotics are often part of routine burn treatment — even if the kids don't need them. We've all had experiences like this. It can take up to two days for a doctor to diagnose an infection, so we're given antibiotics as a "just to be safe" measure ... even if our injury isn't infected.

As a result, antibiotic resistance is now considered one of the biggest health threats we face today. Our overuse of antibiotics is leading to record high levels of antibiotic resistance, and infections and injuries that have been treatable for a long time may once again become difficult to get rid of.

But! Fear not! There's a brilliant new bandage out there that promises to help doctors cut down on doling out unnecessary antibiotics.

It's all about what turns neon green.

Developed by scientists at the University of Bath, this bandage-of-the-future is a special medical dressing that can determine if a wound becomes infected and get results faster than anything else out there today.

The so-called "best bandage ever" uses UV light to provide the answers people need ... fast.

These bandages contain nanocapsules that contain a dye that bursts open in the presence of disease-causing bacteria. Bright green = infection.

The test on the right is screaming, "Infection!"

As I mentioned before, it can take doctors up to two days to determine if a burn wound is infected. For young kids and their weak immune systems, two days untreated can become a dangerous situation when dealing with infection — or not.

"Children are at particular risk of serious infection from even a small burn," explained Dr. Amber Young. "However, with current methods clinicians can't tell whether a sick child might have a raised temperature due to a serious bacterial burn wound infection, or just from a simple cough or cold.

So it's understandable why antibiotics have been prescribed as precautionary measures for so long.

But with the arrival of these nanocapsule bandages, the future is now; an infection diagnosis is possible within just a few hours, giving doctors the green light to act fast and know exactly what steps are necessary.

This breakthrough can help put families at ease, cut down on hospital costs, and limit the use of unnecessary antibiotics – which has turned into a serious problem.

There's a reason the World Health Organization has launched its first-ever World Antibiotic Resistance Week. If we're not careful, common infections that have been easily treatable in the past will come back to cause some major problems.

This bandage saves the day in two amazing ways: speedy and more accurate diagnoses for infections and fewer unnecessary antibiotics.

For anyone who's been severely burned or injured, you know there's nothing you want more than fast solutions and less hospital time. A diagnosis in two days versus a diagnosis in a few hours is huge!

Nanocapsules to the rescue! Glow on (but preferably don't!), my tiny friends.

See them in action here: