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| Most strains of E.coli are harmless but that doesn't mean you should get too comfortable with poo. |
Can you get sicknesses from your own feces like E.coli? Like say if I rubbed my own poopoo in my eyes, is there a chance I could get the E.coli from that? -- Dwayne from Montpelier, Vermont
Dear Dwayne:
I’m not sure why you’d be rubbing your own poo into your eyes, but from what I’ve read about E.coli, even though it’s a very dangerous bacteria, it only gets into your system by drinking or eating. You might get an eye infection, but you wouldn’t get the classic E.coli diarrhea symptoms. As you can imagine there aren’t many studies about this. Scientific tests can be weird sometimes, but they rarely make people eat their own shit or rub it in their eyeballs. Odds are even if you ate your own E.coli your intestines would recognize the bacteria as its own and it wouldn’t make you sick. I mean if it’s already in the digestive tract, putting it right back in shouldn’t cause a problem. The only question is if it could transmit through the esophagus which is low enough to mess with your digestive system yet high enough that it wouldn’t have immunity since on a good day you never have poop in your foodpipe. I’d like to say with 100% certainty that you wouldn’t get E.coli from yourself, but I can’t. It’s best to just not risk it.
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