Your bed probably isn’t as clean as you think – a microbiologist explains

By Manal Mohammed, Lecturer, Medical Microbiology, University of Westminster

There’s nothing quite like crawling into bed, wrapping up in your blankets, and nestling your head into your pillow. But before you get too comfortable, you might want to know that your bed isn’t all that dissimilar to a petri dish. The combination of sweat, saliva, dandruff, dead skin cells and even food particles make it the optimal environment for a whole host of germs such as bacteria, fungi, viruses and even tiny bugs to grow.

Here are just a few of the things that lurk beneath our covers.

Bacteria

Our beds can play a host to a vast variety of bacterial species.…

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