Your hotel room is not dirty: it becomes home to your bacteria within hours

Hotel guests can put away their germ-provoked scruples now that a team of researchers shows that our hotel rooms become home to our own bacteria within hours of our arrivals.

by John Tyburski

Copyright © Daily Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

First published at Daily Digest News on August 28, 2014

When humans move from place to place, they take a lot with them that remains completely unseen by the naked eye. Each one of us carries a massive ecosystem of microbes, or “microbiome,” both inside and outside of our bodies. Our individual microbiomes set up shop in our new locations rather quickly, it turns out. At least that is what researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory are saying.

A new study published on Friday in Science Magazine reveals how people put down their own bacterial signatures in their environments. The bacteria unique to an individual and common to a family move from their bodies and personal effects to their new environments at staggering speeds, the researchers discovered. They observed this repopulation whenever families moved from one home to another and into hotel rooms.

“Everyone thinks hotels are icky,” said Jack Gilbert, corresponding author of the study and environmental microbiologist at Argonne, “but when one young couple we studied moved into a hotel, it was microbiologically identical to their home within 24 hours.”

“No matter what you do to clean a hotel room, your microbial signal has wiped out basically every trace of the previous resident within hours,” said Gilbert.

The study looked at how bacteria serve as indicators of how family members move around in their homes and make contact with one another. The findings have obvious potential use in forensics.

“We could go all J. Edgar Hoover on this and make a database of microbial fingerprints of people all over the world,” Gilbert said, “and it’s far more sophisticated than a standard fingerprint, which is just a presence or absence indication. We can see who they are, where they’re from, the diet they’re eating, when they left, who they may have been interacting with. It gets pretty crazy.”

Gilbert also said the findings have potential implications for how parents bring up their children. He advised that parents get their kids outside the home because exposure to bacteria in the environment is good for them. Gilbert also advised parents to get a dog.

“We saw dogs acting as a super-charged conduit,” he said, “transferring bacteria between one human and another, and bringing in outdoor bacteria. They just run around distributing microbes all willy-nilly.”

Hear a full description of the research in Gilbert’s own words via this week’s Science podcast.