Bugs & Beards & Man’s Best Friend

Startups take note! There's a market for beard wash…a big market! Last year, a team of European researchers compared the bacterial load of specimens taken from human beards and dogs. The results may have caused headlines but the actual purpose of the study was to investigate whether, from a hygiene perspective, it's okay to use human MRI devices for scanning our four-legged friends.

“The main objective of this prospective multi-centre study is to determine whether it would be hygienic to evaluate dogs and humans in the same MRI scanner by comparing the microbial flora of dogs and humans,” said the authors who published their work in the July issue of European Radiology.

To achieve that objective, the team took bacterial samples from the coats and mouths of 30 dogs that had been brought to the hospital for MRI examinations of disorders affecting the brain or spinal cord.
For their comparison group, the researchers picked 18 bearded men who also had upcoming MRI examinations at one of the three radiological departments participating in the study. The team “cautiously” pressed agar plates onto the beards, along with taking swabs from the men's mouths.

According to the study: “A total of 18/18 men displayed high microbe counts, while seven dogs exhibited moderate microbe counts and 23 dogs had high microbe counts. More human-pathogenic bacteria were found in the men's beard than in the dogs' fur. In 7/18 humans and 4/30 dogs, we found human-pathogenic bacteria. However, this difference does not meet statistical significance (p = 0.074).”