There’s a good reason why you should wash your hands after urination. And no, it doesn’t matter if you have the cleanest, straightest, most precise pee aim known to man. “The rationale is that when toileting, it’s possible to have fecal material and fecal bacteria get onto your hands,” says Richard T. Ellison III, an epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center. (Two nasty byproducts of ingesting fecal matter are E. Coli and hepatitis.) “So it’s wisest to always wash with soap and water even after urinating. Neither plain water nor alcohol hand sanitizers are effective at removing fecal material or killing bacteria in fecal material.”
Now, you might be wondering: How can you get fecal matter on your hands if you’re directing your super soaker directly into the urinal, no spillage and splashback whatsoever? For starters, bathroom-door handles have so much bacteria on them, you could use one to colonize Mars. And if that’s not enough for you, flushing actually launches aerosolized toilet funk into the air, which can travel up to six feet. That means virtually everything you touch in the bathroom could be coated with a fine mist of invisible poo particles.
Gross.
So, uh, yeah. That’s why you should wash your hands after urination.