I’m not going to be Howard Hughes

A new study from the Korean Consumer Protection Board has shown that shopping cart handles harbor more bacteria than public bathroom door knobs.

The study showed that shopping cart handles had and average of 1,100 colony forming units of bacteria per 10 sq. cm. Public bathroom door knobs had only 340 units.

There were an average 690 colony forming units found on a computer mouse used at Internet cafes. Hand straps on buses were found to have 380 units, elevator buttons had 130, and hand straps on subways had 86 units on average.

And now, this important legislation from Fred Allen, a freshman Arkansas legislator from Little Rock. Playing to his base of "older women", Fred apparently heard from a "number of older women" who were afraid to go to the grocery store because of what might lurk on their shopping cart handles.

“They mentioned that they didn’t want to go shopping because the shopping carts were nasty,” he said.

As a result of those encounters, Arkansas is poised to become to the first state in the nation to officially encourage groceries to offer sanitary wipes to customers who use shopping carts.

Though bolstered by his first legislative success, Mr. Allen said he had no plans to promote the sanitation of other public handles, like those of doors, vending machines and escalators.

“I’m not going to be Howard Hughes,” he said.

Me neither...