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Ok this is almost as gross as when I found out how much vaginal secretions are on movie theater seat ( No joke. Reports say it was from girls in shorts skirts without underwear). Next Bart ride I will pull a garbage out of my back pack and sit on it. Better yet, don’t sit or touch anything.
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On BART Trains, the Seats Are Taken (by Bacteria)
Carrie Nee prefers to stand during her half-hour commute on BART from San Leandro to downtown San Francisco. Although the trains’ blue fabric seats are plush and comfortable, Ms. Nee refuses to sit on them.
Thor Swift for The Bay Citizen
Jason Martinez removed a dirty seat cushion from a BART train before replacing it with a clean one at the South Hayward train yard.
A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of the San Francisco Bay Area for The New York Times. To join the conversation about this article, go to baycitizen.org.
“I would love to sit down, but it just grosses me out. They’re disgusting,” said Ms. Nee, a 26-year-old records clerk.
Riders on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system have long complained about germs in the hard-to-clean cloth seats. As Bob Franklin, the BART board president, acknowledged, “People don’t know what’s in there.”
Now they do.
The Bay Citizen commissioned Darleen Franklin, a supervisor at San Francisco State University’s biology lab, to analyze the bacterial content of a random BART seat. The results may make you want to stand during your trip.
Fecal and skin-borne bacteria resistant to antibiotics were found in a seat on a train headed from Daly City to Dublin/Pleasanton. Further testing on the skin-borne bacteria showed characteristics of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the drug-resistant bacterium that causes potentially lethal infections, although Ms. Franklin cautioned that the MRSA findings were preliminary.
Related Articles
- You: The Bay Citizen: On BART Trains, the Seats Are Taken (by Bacteria) (nytimes.com)
- BART seats have MRSA, other superbugs [Thoughts from Kansas] (scienceblogs.com)
Accidental Bear 