Do paper toilet seat covers really prevent anything?

Liz W is right! They protect you from hypothetical germs. The seat covers are provided to make people feel better. They don't help, but they don't do any harm either.

If the toilet seat is soaked with body fluid (I know, yuck), then the body fluid will soak right through the paper seat cover.

The toilet seat may be, as other posters suggest, cleaner than other surfaces like the stall door lock or the hot-water faucet.

My students did an experiment where they swabbed various surfaces and grew bacteria in agar dishes. The dirtiest surface? A doorknob! The next dirtiest? A fellow student's unwashed hands! The toilet-seat swab grew no bacteria.

Do Toilet Seat Covers Work

Theoretically, the only way you are going to catch something from a toilet seat is if the person who was there before left some infected body fluid and you would have to sit on it almost immediately and you would have to have an open cut/sore on your body that is in contact with the infected fluid.

Toilet seat covers therefore do not really prevent anything other than decrease paranoia about sitting on a toilet seat. Personally I just give the seat a wipe if there's anything on it and then I sit, no cover.

As the previous poster mentioned, there are more harmful germs on a doorknob than on a toilet seat. I know when I did microbiology, one of the assignments we did was to swab different areas and then see what we could grow from them. My swab from a communal toilet seat did not grow anything harmful, but the swab from the doorknob and from a kitchen countertop grew a hell of a lot more!

The idea that public toilet seats are riddled with germs is false. They are actually MUCH cleaner than the average desktop or doornob (creepy huh?) However, I think the paper would provide a barrier against hypothetical germs. It's not like they can travel through the paper.

Think about it for a moment...The "area" you want to avoid getting bad bacteria into (i.e., urethra, vagina or anus) is the area that is not protected by the seat-cover. Seat covers only provide aesthetic comfort to protect people from "materials" sitting on the toilet seat. Bacteria dies quickly in the air and generally doesn't migrate to the target areas. So unless you are wiping your hand along the toilet seat, and immediately rubbing the target areas, it really is of a psychological benefit only.

Toilet seat covers do not work. Liz W is right. Kitchen cutting boards have 200x more fecal matter than toilet seats. Think about that! Source below.

If nothing else it makes you FEEL safer...LOL and it does give you a barrier between the skin of the butts that have been there before!

well it prevents more than an unprotected seat

i think it would work. your not making contact to the seat sooooooooo