We all know that you should be washing your hands more often than you probably are already; after rides on the subway, eating or preparing food, and before you handle little bundles of joy. As it turns out, none of it matters because your cell phone is a harbinger of hay fever that’ll kill you the very next time you use it to check Twitter.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a test of the surface of smartphones revealed a veritable make-out party for bacteria, who then make the jump into your face holes. In a random test of phones, they even found abnormally high levels of fecal contaminants, so please stop trying to tell me you don’t post a pithy response to a status message on Facebook while in the can, because you do, and you can stop the charade now.

On the plus side, I hate talking on the phone, so the odds of bird flu getting into my ears is pretty slim.

Still, BEWARE. Our iPhones are killing us, and not just through radiation and making us targets for armed thieves anymore. Clearly, the answer is to wrap our mobiles in saran wrap and wearing latex gloves while handling them, then replacing both the next time you use it. All of a sudden, those Google goggle things they’re pushing don’t seem so stupid.*

*Actually, they still seem pretty stupid.