do you ever do this in some ways sharing
earbuds is like sharing a q-tip even
though you don't use earbuds to clean
your ears
you're still shoving them pretty far in
there an ear acts can get stuck in the
crevices of the earbud so when you share
them you might be trading wax with
someone but is that a bad thing
generally I like to stay away from
sharing earbuds I often will do the
split earbud thing where you've got one
in your ear and you give it to your
friend you're like here's a cool song I
listen to this with me I just feel bad
for whoever it has to share up on your
buds they can borrow the over the years
but they can't borrow in buds to see how
gross ear buds really are we swap 22
pairs to get tested for bacteria we also
swap two over ear headphones to see if
they were any different and then we took
the swabs to Colombia's microbiology lab
what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take
those swabs and inoculate them onto
auger plates so agar plates are what we
use to grow bacteria and yeast and
sometimes mold there's more bacterial
cells as part of our body than normal
human cells so we know that they're
going to grow something it's sort of a
dark moist warm place your ear canal so
that's a terrific breeding ground so if
you introduce bacteria or fungus into
the outside of your ear you can
propagate the growth of that just by the
nature of what our ear canal is like the
red plate is a sheep blood agar plate
and it grows all bacteria and then this
plate is about konkey plate and it
mainly just grows gram-negative rods so
like bacteria that you'd find in poop in
a previous test whittier found strains
of MRSA and yup fecal matter on people's
smartphones we let the earbud samples
incubate for about three days and then
went back to the lab to check out the
results two samples were positive for
yeast
so that's certainly not something you'd
want to share this is the grossest
looking thing we found the culture that
was positive for bacillus something we
find in soil I was really shocked we
didn't find anything super gross or
super dirty you do all have certain
bacteria on her skin and most of what we
recovered was that it's a species of
Staphylococcus called coagulase negative
Staphylococcus and that's the
predominant organism that we have on our
skin so the theory that ear canals may
have something a little bit different
didn't really pan out because we got the
organisms that we would expect as a few
swab your arm but two of the samples did
grow yeast and one grew a type of
bacteria associated with dirt so even
though most of the bacteria found was
normal skin bacteria the yeast was a
little off-putting there was I don't
know what nice is really I don't feel
that bad about that one I think if I had
to share my eggs for somebody else the
yeast is just a nice way to say fungus
and it can cause itching it can cause
swelling it can cause in fact I actually
just had a patient who had the worst
yeast infection in her ears I've seen in
ages so I'm unlikely to start sharing my
ear buds at the gym even though these
results show that we really didn't find
anything too strange or too pathogenic
but that's just me you know we didn't
know what we were gonna find um and it
turns out that there were you know just
normal bacteria but I'd still like to
keep my bacteria to myself well we
didn't find anything too gross on any of
the ear buds you still might want to
consider rubbing them with an alcohol
swab before going from a friend's ear to
yours
you