The viral spread over the last few days of a study on bacteria in hotel rooms has left me a little queasy. Not from the germs, but from the hype.
Here’s the situation. A study out of the University of Houston measured bacterial counts in 19 spots inside hotel rooms. Some points with the highest readings were no surprise (toilets), while others were not so obvious (bedside light switches, TV remote controls). After the findings were presented during a conference of the American Society for Microbiology earlier this week, cries of “Eww, grrrross!” could be heard coast-to-coast.
Problem is, there’s no story there. “Overall there is no take away for consumers from this study,” says Sujata Sirsat, a UH post-doc who helped supervise the study’s undergraduate researcher. Despite the ominous headlines (eg. “Study: Hotel rooms often contaminated with fecal matter” in the Newark Star-Ledger) , it seems that most news outlets never bothered to examine the study. If they had, they would have seen that out of the 4.81 million-plus hotel rooms in the United States, the researchers examined a whopping…
Wait for it…
9 rooms. Three states, one hotel in each state, three rooms in each hotel.
That’s 0.000187 percent of the hotel rooms in America, and results varied from room to room. It would be comparable to saying that the combined citizenry of Chicago, Dallas and San Jose (about 4.84 million) was all, say, fans of the Kardashians, based on asking three people living on one block in each city.
To their credit, the researchers never said that their findings were conclusive. “By and large, the hotel industry is doing a good job cleaning rooms,” Sirsat told me. And at the conference, the undergrad researcher, Katie Kirsch, noted the small sample size and suggested further study.
The upshot: it may turn out that hotel rooms actually are filled with nasties, but we can’t say yet.
I’m all for hygiene, but I think the fear-mongering based on such a self-admittedly inconclusive study was kind of inexcusable.
That doesn’t mean that the study was unwelcome. Joe McInerney, president and CEO of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, a Washington, DC-based advocacy group for the hotel industry, told me “We really appreciate people that are out there doing this research.” Such information, he said, is useful for training purposes. Plus, “It gives us an opportunity to not have to pay for it.”