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Study: Women's hands germier

WASHINGTON - Wash your hands, folks, especially you ladies. A new study has found that women have a greater variety of bacteria on their hands than men do. And everybody has more types of bacteria than the researchers expected to find.

WASHINGTON - Wash your hands, folks, especially you ladies.

A new study has found that women have a greater variety of bacteria on their hands than men do. And everybody has more types of bacteria than the researchers expected to find.

"One thing that really is astonishing is the variability between individuals, and also between hands on the same individual," said University of Colorado biochemistry professor Rob Knight, a co-author of the paper.

"The sheer number of bacteria species detected on the hands of the study participants was a big surprise, and so was the greater diversity of bacteria we found on the hands of women," added lead researcher Noah Fierer, an assistant biology professor at Colorado.

The researchers aren't sure why women harbored a greater variety of bacteria than men, but Fierer suggested it may have to so with the acidity of the skin. Knight said men generally have more acidic skin than women.

The researchers identified 4,742 species of bacteria overall, only five of which were on every hand, according to an online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. *