Should You Take Off Your Shoes Indoors?

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Shoes on or off ... that is the question.
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▼ Are you one of those hosts who's immediately gripped by this conundrum as your guests step across the threshold into your home: Should you, or shouldn't you, ask them to remove their shoes?
On the one hand, it makes you look like a fussy host. On the other, what about the legions of disease-causing bacteria that will gleefully leap off their shoes and inevitably infest your home?
Avoiding bacterial invasion at the risk of a little social awkwardness seems like a no-brainer. But are shoe bacteria something we should really be worried about in our homes? Here's what science tells us about how to navigate this conundrum.
To start with, there's no point in sugarcoating the pill: the average shoe harbors "hundreds of thousands of bacteria per square inch," according to Jonathan Sexton, an environmental microbiologist and research specialist at the University of Arizona. The soles of our shoes are essentially a meet and greet for these microbes, and with each step we take, we pick up new attendants. "Pretty much wherever you go, you're going to be picking up stuff," Sexton told Live Science. (Beware, however: So me places like  bathroomsdo harbor more bacteria and a greater diversity, he said.)
But exactly what types of bacterial communities are hanging out on our shoes, and do they pose a legitimate health threat? Well, previous studieshave shown that (prepare yourself) almost all shoes in some research samples were coated with fecal bacteria, including one prominent bug calledEscherichia coli(E.coli), which researchers discovered on 96 percent of shoe soles. While many types ofE.coliare harmless to humans, some strains can cause severe diarrhea, urinary tract infections and even meningitis. "Not necessarily on every shoe, but on a good majority, you can find some type ofE.colithere," Sexton said.
Apart from this ubiquitous germ, other studies have also found evidence of things like Staphylococcus aureus, which underlies a wide range of skin infections, and more worryingly, infections of the blood and the heart. Another prominent study published in  2014 in the journal Anaerobesampled 30 households in Houston, Texas, for the presence ofClostridium difficile(C. difficile), a bacterium with a long lifespan that commonly causes bowel problems like diarrhea. Of all the household items they sampled, the researchers found that shoes harbored moreC. difficilethan even the surface of a toilet — underscoring the power that grubby soles could have to spread germs through a home.
But despite the horrifying picture this paints of microbe-infested interiors, (▪ ▪ ▪)

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