Pillows are gross, science confirms. How gross, you ask? Well, according to a new study by British health care provider Barts and the London NHS Trust, "up to a third of the weight of your pillow could be made up of bugs, dead skin and house dust mites and their feces." Yeah, that gross. Researchers examined hundreds of used hospital pillows, discovering E. coli, respiratory and urinary tract infection-causing germs, and "more than one million Staphylococcus hominus per mililitre--the bug [that] can cause severe infections in people with immune systems." But Dr. Arthur Tucker, one of Barts and the London NHS Trust's principal scientists, told The Daily Mail that such hordes of bugs and bacteria are not limited to hospital beds. And Gabriel Scientific's technical director Duncan Bain went so far as declaring, "If you had to come up with a medium to cultivate bacteria, besides a Petri dish with agar [a gelatinous food], a pillow is pretty much as good as you can get." Now that is just nasty. 

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Caitlin Dickson