Ok, if we're telling work-related germ stories, I have a couple!
As a young nurse I was pulling an overnight shift. It was busy, but I finally found a minute to sit down to eat my salad. I had taken a bite or two when my patient's call bell rang. Nobody else was around, so I went in to answer it. The patient was a quadriplegic, i.e. he had no use of any of his extremities since he'd had an accident years before. When I went in, he said, "Can you pick my nose? "
We had a conversation about blowing vs picking, but nope, he simply
had to have his nose
picked. So I went to the supply room, got some long handled "cotton applicators" (aka QTips), went back into his room, and started digging. Afterward, I came back and finished my salad, albeit somewhat reluctantly, lol.
I also worked in a bakery while I was in college. An old time baker told me the story of the time he came into work early one Sunday morning, still quite hungover from the night before. His first order of business was to make a rye bread dough in a huge mixer. As he was pouring in the rye, it made him sick, and he vomited right into the mixer.
Rather than clean it out and start over, he just kept it going. So those who bought Rye bread that week got more than they bargained for.
I think that unless you make food yourself and
know it's ok, there's a good chance it wasnt made under perfectly sanitary circumstances. We've all watched the shows and seen the articles on what goes on at restaurants and such... yet most of us survive the everyday germs...
I do agree that some germs can be deadly, but many of those are considered adulterants and should not be found in food. Picking up EColi 0157:H7 would be extremely unlikely from sharing a bag of chips - although with that thawing ground beef on the counter, many millions of the deadly bacteria can be found in a drop of blood and can produce a life-threatening infection. (If you do that, wash the area down well with Lysol wipes.)
People talk about eating raw hamburger when they were kids - that particular germ wasn't "discovered" until the 1980s when people started getting sick and dying from it. It is thought that it came about when cows' diet changed from grass to corn, and their intestines responded by producing this bacteria. It's interesting to read about. Anyway, PLEASE don't eat raw hamburger today. Or drink raw milk, for the same reason. (It's all related to cow intestinal contents, so yes, you're ingesting their poop - the former, which gets on meat during slaughter, and the latter gets into milk from the milking process, which then isn't pasteurized.) There are other ways to pick it up - petting zoos (same reason), sprouts and some other foods, which may be from harvesting or washing with runoff water where cows or others have pooped upstream. EColi is killed at 160 degrees - so if you're cooking, there's a good chance it will be killed. But raw food, like sprouts, do not have a kill step.
Food for thought on this lovely Monday morning!