Netflix DVDs and their envelopes pass from hand to hand, and from home to home, with all sorts of interesting opportunities for contamination. What sorts of bacteria are on them? A Texas local news team set out to find out and discovered…well, not much of anything likely to kill you. Sorry to disappoint.

We began our test by unsealing each Netflix envelope. We removed each disk from its sleeve, and the lab supervisor swabbed them front and back. Once each petri-dish was swabbed, the plates were placed inside an incubator.

A few days later, we found at least four different kinds of bacteria growing inside the plates. But it wasn’t what Dr. Wallace expected.

“They were fairly clean,” said Wallace. “If I took my fingers and laid them on the top of the plates, this is what you’d grow.”

As for the disks themselves, Wallace said he found nothing that could potentially cause disease.

Netflix under the microscope…literally [KLTV] (via Hacking Netflix)

(Photo: Kimaroo)

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