It may not be just the late fees that are making you feel ill. It turns out that keeping your wallet tucked away may also keep you healthy.
Flu and cold germs typically spread from person to person through coughing or sneezing. However, if you’ve touched something with germs on it, then touch your nose or mouth, you may also become infected.
And that’s where your wallet full of plastic comes in.
Germs can remain alive on inanimate objects or surfaces for two to eight hours, and those inanimate objects include your credit cards. Sick cashiers can pass along germs if they handle your card during a transaction.
That eight-hour time frame is actually the good news. Some of the hardiest germs can successfully reproduce on plastic surfaces for weeks. Studies conducted in the past have shown that a few antibiotic-resistant germs could survive on plastic surfaces for three full months!
Keep in mind that germs live longest in wet environments, so a droplet from a sneeze that lands on your card could contain thousands of germs — which could be transferred to other adjacent cards when you slide it back into your wallet, potentially contaminating cards you haven’t even touched.
While you can cut down on the chances of a sick cashier passing along an illness through your card by swiping the plastic through a card reader yourself, you’ll likely be exchanging one risk for another, since punching a PIN number into a keypad poses its own problems – Keypads are among the dirtiest things around, and by using it to enter a code or get cash back, you could be transferring germs through your hands.
Wiping your cards down with an alcohol-based sanitiser might help prevent card-based germ transmission, but people should keep everything in perspective. Germs are everywhere, but if we’re careful about washing our hands and using sanitiser, we won’t suffer any consequences.
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