Wash up: According to a recent observational survey, men are nearly three times more likely not to wash their hands after going to the bathroom as women. Is that surprising?Okay guys, we’ve got a problem here. The hand-washing police have been keeping tabs on us and have found that one-third of us don’t wash our hands after going the bathroom. On the otherhand, so to speak, only 12 percent of women skip the sink when they’re leaving a bathroom.

The bathroom police is the Soap and Detergent Association, which released its new findings in a report made public on Monday. And it slams men pretty hard. The same survey conducted two years ago showed that 25 percent of men didn’t wash their hand then.

The information is based on observations made last month of the behaviors of more than 6,000 people in public restrooms in four major U.S. cities.

Okay, so they really weren’t police officers, but the researchers conducting the study actually had people standing in public restrooms monitoring and recording the washing habits of the people who came through. And you thought you had a bad job.

Anyway, what’s really interesting is to compare the numbers to what people say of their washing habits in telephone interviews. In a Harris Interactive survey, 92 percent of respondents said that they wash after every trip to the bathroom.

Back to the observational survey, here are stats from each of the bathrooms visited:

• Atlanta's Turner Field baseball stadium again was the worst. Only 57 percent of guys there washed up, compared to 95 percent of women.

• New York was Second City to Chicago in cleanliness. In restrooms at the Windy City's Shedd Aquarium and Museum of Science and Industry, 81 percent of men and women combined washed their hands, compared to 79 percent at the Big Apple's Penn and Grand Central train stations.

• At San Francisco's Ferry Terminal Farmers Market, 62.5 percent of men lathered up. Women did better, with 84 percent.

Frequent hand washing is the single best thing people can do to avoid getting sick, from colds and the flu to germs lurking in food, doctors say. But we all know that, right? So why don’t we wash up better?

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