A Growing Concern: How Clean Is That Netflix Disc, Anyway?

In a time when everyone’s getting into a giant tizzy about H1N1 and the regular flu and the rockin-pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu, even thought those last two don’t actually exist that I know of, everyone’s looking a little harder at hand washings and hand sanitizer. The things you touch are now suddenly suspect, and one of the things being looked at the hardest are those Netflix discs.

As it turns out, though, there’s no real cause for alarm.  A Texas news team brought us this snippet:

We began our test by unsealing each Netflix envelope. We removed each disk from its sleeve, and the lab supervisor swabbed them front and back. Once each petri-dish was swabbed, the plates were placed inside an incubator.

A few days later, we found at least four different kinds of bacteria growing inside the plates. But it wasn’t what Dr. Wallace expected.

“They were fairly clean,” said Wallace. “If I took my fingers and laid them on the top of the plates, this is what you’d grow.”

As for the disks themselves, Wallace said he found nothing that could potentially cause disease.

Pretty minimal problem, really.  Not a whole lot of trouble here outside of the ordinary.  So take heart, folks, and enjoy your Netflix.

Now…what would they find on a Blockbuster Online disc….?