![Ice. Refreshing. Filthy.](http://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/800px-humbertcerveza.jpg?w=470)
HumbertoIce. Refreshing. Filthy.
According to the research of Jasmine Roberts, a 12 year old doing a school science project, Southern Florida has either very clean toilets or very dirty ice. Jasmine collected ice samples from five Florida restaurants, and then collected samples of water from the toilets of the same restaurants. The results are not good: The ice had more bacteria than the toilet water.
Kind of makes you think about how you wash your hands when you go to the bathroom, but people just put their bare hands willy-nilly on those ice scoops that go into the ice machine. And those bare hands are not always pristine, judging from the fact that Jasmine’s samples contained E. coli bacteria, which comes from human waste.
According to the convention of all studies like this, now that we’ve told you this incredibly foul thing, we will now tell you why it’s actually kind of not that big a deal: Toilet water comes from sanitized city water supplies and is actually pretty clean. And also people put their hands with poop all over them into ice machines.
The cutest part of this story is that the little girl did the study because she hates it when her friends chew ice. Now she can tell them they are not only being annoying, they may in fact be risking their health. Or at least just eating poop.
![](https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/newspaper-clippings-nightmare-weather1.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=768)