You may want to clean your mobile phone more often than never.

Recently released photos by The University of Surrey show the amount of bacteria that is present on the surface of the average smartphone.

Students imprinted their phones into Petri dishes – then let the bacteria grow for 3 days. The results were, well…

Phones pick up bacteria from their owner, other people and wherever the phone is placed (purse, ground, etc.) – as Dr Simon Park explains: a nose-picker who goes on to text message will create bacteria colonies on their phone. Bacteria was found to especially “cluster” around the iPhone home button.

In most cases, the bacteria is relatively harmless – but in some, the bacteria found can lead to infections such as food poisoning, impetigo and even septicaemia.