Is urine actually sterile?

This cocktail party factoid is pretty dumb

It's a fact frequently shared at parties and across social media: urine is sterile, so you should drink it if you find yourself in a waterless pinch. But like so many cocktail party factoids, this one is absolutely not true. Urine ain't sterile, friends, and neither is any part of you.

Microbes are an indelible part of our bodies and the world around us. Not even the uterus and placenta, long thought to enshroud fetuses in sterile envelopes during gestation, are actually germ-free zones. They contain complex, varied microbial colonies—microbiomes—that help prepare us for the real world.

But it's apparent that many doctors are still under the impression that urine is sterile (unless someone has a urinary tract infection). That's likely a holdover from the days when bacteria in the body was thought of as a negative thing—the source of infections—as opposed to the complicated garden we now know to exist within us. It would be absurd to assume that a healthy urinary tract has absolutely no bacteria in it, given the abundance of microbes throughout our body. In fact, research indicates that replenishing the "good" bacteria found in the vagina can help prevent or treat urinary tract infections—so it seems likely that these friendly bacteria often traffic there.

So even if urine was sterile at some point, you better believe it's teeming with microbial life by the time it finishes its journey to your toilet (or wherever you're putting it).

Indeed, recent studies have indicated that bacteria are present in urine, though bacterial counts are lower in healthy urine than in the pee of someone suffering from an infection (duh).

Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/urine-sterile-drinking-pee

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We finally know how durian got so stinky

Image
Durian fruit is well known for it's very strong smell. One might say it smells like sewage mixed with gasoline. Depositphotos Durian, best known in the United States as a fruit so stinky it caused the normally unflappable Andrew Zimmern of Bizarre Foods fame to gag, has an unexpected (though arguably as pungent) cousin. In a study published today in Nature Genetics, researchers sequenced durian’s genome to reveal not only the source of its distinctive stench, but also the fact that it shares family ties with cacao—the plant that gives us fragrant joy in the form of chocolate. “Now that we have the genome sequence of durian, we can compare them to different plant sequences that are in the public domain,” says study author Patrick Tan a biomedical researcher at Singapore’s Dune-NUS Medical School. “A number of interesting features came up. We found that durian’s closest earliest ancestor is the cacao plant.” Once you know that cacao and durian share an ancestry, the similar...
Read more

Computer Models Show What Exactly Would Happen To Earth After A Nuclear War

Image
WASP PRIME TEST FROM OPERATION TEAPOT Wikimedia Commons You've seen what a nuclear winter looks like, as imagined by filmmakers and novelists. Now you can take a look at what scientists have to say. In a new study, a team of four U.S. atmospheric and environmental scientists modeled what would happen after a "limited, regional nuclear war." To inexpert ears, the consequences sound pretty subtle—two or three degrees of global cooling, a nine percent reduction in yearly rainfall. Still, such changes could be enough to trigger crop failures and famines. After all, these would be cooler temperatures than the Earth has seen in 1,000 years. et's take a detailed look at some of these super-fun conclusions, shall we? First, what happened? The team imagines 100 nuclear warheads, each about the size of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, detonate over the Indian subcontinent. The team members are imagining an India-Pakistan nuclear war. It seems unfair to ...
Read more