The Air You Breathe Is Laced With Dog Poop Bacteria
Earlier this week we learned that dogs are good for your respiratory system because they can smell your lung cancer. But are dogs also maybe bad for your lungs, because they manufacture poop that's loaded with airborne bacteria?
Well, the team of scientists who have been studying the bacteria say "there may be no health affects at all" from inhaling air that's chock full of them, so there's your official answer. So just relax and take a deep breath.
The scientists detected the possibly harmless (though maybe not!) poop-germs in air samples from Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Mayville, Wisconsin. According to their findings, the air in Detroit, America's favorite hard-boned, old-school urban hellhole, was the most bacteria-saturated of all, the poor thing. Is Detroit's problem so severe because stray dogs have replaced/eaten all the human inhabitants? No, apparently:
It's not necessarily that Detroit has more dogs than other places, although the study noted reports of more than 10,000 stray dogs in the city. Nationwide, the average dog population is 37 percent of the human population, or about one dog for every three people. In Detroit, that would mean about 265,000 dogs.
The scientists want to study the air of other American cities to see how widespread this poop-germ problem actually is. So you should just hold off on the jokes about Detroit and its air until you're relatively certain that your own town's problems aren't even worse than theirs. Looking at you, Toronto.
