Isnt urine sterile? I have to say that I consider my nether regions pretty clean. (I wouldnt eat off of them but I have known people that would 
) besides, its not like I am peeing all over my hands anyway.
So whats the big deal?
The Master says your nether regions are germ riddled, even if you think your clean. You should wash yourself after touching yourself down there.
damn! lost link!
But but…why?
Isnt touching a doorknob signifigantly nastier than touching your nethers?
Exactly. I’d suggest that lifting the lid and also flushing are much nastier than touching yourself. That’s why you wash.
Splashing!
Ahh but what if the lid is up and you don’t have to touch it? Well, even if you wash your hands you are going to have to touch the doorknob on the way out (either that or just the door).
These answers are ok but I am kind of wondering if there is an actual bacterial or disease oriented reason that we should wash our hands after we pee.
Not doing so seems less harmless than many other things we are accustomed to touching.
The groin area is warm and can be moist (due to sweating, for example). It’s a perfect breeding ground for bacteria. Plus your anus is nearby. Bacteria can migrate from normal skin-on-skin rubbing and by transfer to your clothing. (This is probably something you don’t necessarily want to think about when performing oral sex.) Since your penis lives in a warm, moist, bacteria-filled environment, you should wash your hands.
As Sailor noted, your crotch is laden with germs, more specifically, the enteric pathogen germs. Far more likely to cause illness than what’s on a doorknob, and in much higher concentrations, too.
You are most likely tolerant to the particular strains of E. Coli you harbor in your bowels and crotch, but the co-worker you shake hands with may not be, and you could give him rip-roaring diarrhea.
Typhoid Mary is reputed to have sickened many, as she was colonized with Salmonella typhi. She was immune to its pathogenic effects, but others weren’t.
Wash your damn hands! 
Ok Ok that was good Qadgop but the thing that got my curiousity going is that I am nearly the only person that washes my hands here after I take a leak. Hell, most of these guys don’t wash after they poop.
No raging outbreaks of E Coli or riproaring diarrhea to be found.
It’s easy to make it sound nasty, but how dangerous is it, really?
I mean, as Johnny LA noted.
Long day already.
I actually think you should wash before you pee to get off the cooties you’ve picked up from shaking hands w/people who didn’t wash and from touching the bathroom door, door knob, stll door, etc. which are riddled w/germs from people who didn’t wash. Then pee. Then use anti-bacterial gel when you get back to your desk. I have a thing about touching other things in the bathroom after I’ve already washed my hands. So, I wash my hands after and then I kill those cooties as soon as I get back to my desk.
Overkill, I know.
Just because urine is sterile doesn’t mean it’s healty. Sterile means there’s no bacteria or spores in it. Sterile does not mean non-toxic. Sterile does not mean it won’t make you sick. Clorox is also sterile, but I would wash my hands after coming in contact with it.
The amount of urine which splashes on your hands is not really enough to make you sick or anything, but if you want to ingest urine, that’s your choice. That probably falls into the region of things that are yucky rather than unhealthy.
A good reason for washing your hands after you urinate is that it’s a good idea to wash your hands often. You’re probably near a sink when you urinate, so you might as well wash your hands while you’re there. Helps get off the germs and whatnot you’ve picked up during the day that really could make you sick.
Alot of people suffering from ‘flu like symptoms’ , inclduing fever, stomache problems, chills, diareah (which are not truly flu like), or who have gastrointestinals issues, or have 24 hour ‘bug’ are suffering from ecoli battles and things like that.
It won’t be such an outbreak as to make the evening news, and adults can battle such contaminations and live, but it goes on all the time.
I always use my shoe-covered foot to lift and lower the seat and to flip the flush lever, but I still always wash my hands after, too. Maybe it’s sterile, but do you want your hands to smell like urine… or sweaty crotch? Which brings us to one of the reasons I don’t shake hands…
Urine is sterile when it leaves the bladder, yes. But once it touches anything non-sterile (like, say, your skin) it’s contaminated. And as I recall, it’s a pretty good growth medium for bacteria and such. Do you really want to feed all the crap you’ve picked up from the doorknobs and everything else?
That said, your coworkers are filthy, disgusting pigs. The stuff they’re spreading around probably won’t kill anyone, at least not anyone who’s been around them for a while. Same for making people dangerously sick. But you know those “stomach viruses” that tend to make the rounds of a lot of offices? A lot of them are probably cases of bacterial enteritis caused by the fact that these slobs don’t wash their hands.
Surprisingly, this is probably the one little factoid I’ve posted most often on the boards. It’s amazing how often it comes up:
Urine, in the bladder, is sterile. Barring a bladder infection, of course. However, there are bacteria living inside your urethra. So by the time the urine leaves your body, it has picked up bacteria, and is no longer sterile. When doctors need a sterile urine speicmen, for whatever reason, they’ll either collect it midflow, so that most (but not all) of the bacteria will have been flushed out, or if it needs to be really sterile, they’ll take a bigass needle and stick it right into your bladder from the front.
In a large office, on any given day, a number of people fight these ‘bugs’ for 24-48 hours. Most of these illnesses come from people spreading germs that don’t need to be spread because of poor hygiene. One of my job duties is to predict the number of people that will be out on any given day, and predict this for the entire year to match staffing with hourly demand.
Our "shrinkage’ rate (staff lost to illness) and our FMLA rate due to gastro-whatever problems is just out of control. We have what is known as the ‘24 hour bug’, ‘the runs’, and ‘stomache flu’ like it’s going out of style.
Stomache flu is the biggest joke. People don’t even know what the flu is. Stomache flu doesn’t exist. People get ‘the shits’ and then complain to HR that the Flu shot ‘didn’t work’. Duh.
People are pigs. As I matured, I learned to keep my hands out of my mouth and to keep them clean . I don’t bite my nails anymore, no matter what.
I know I’ve come down with infections long ago because I’ve transferred germs from hand to mouth. It hasn’t happened in a long time, but that’s because I’m aware. I don’t get the shits/run/stomache flu. But alot of the same people get it. And the are their own worst enemy.
Next time you get something like I mentioned, you’ll wonder how those nasty germs made it from the ‘nether’ regions north to your mouth. People transferred them to you…and have you transferred them to others?
Washing you hands, keeping them out of mouth and face is called ‘eliminating a variable’.
What philster said. Many, many transient episodes of vomiting and diarrhea are due to fecal/oral transmission from poor hygiene. If you’re an adult, I guarantee you that you’ve experienced at least half a dozen episodes in your lifetime, with the average number being closer to 20.
Wash your damn hands!!!
Why wash your hands? Because if you don’t, and if people learn of it, they’ll saddle you with the nickname “Old Piddle Paws,” and you’ll never live it down, even if you lived a hundred years!
Trinopus