Sheepshead Bay Subway Stations Infested With Cabbage-Related Bacteria

Now you don’t have to wonder what exactly you’re touching — or avoiding — on the subway because there’s a comprehensive map of almost every type of species (of bacteria, food remnants and other organic material) there, and its conveniently organized by train station.

Researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College spent 18 months collecting, documenting and testing DNA samples from across New York City’s 466 open subway stations. The results are startling: as reported in the Wall Street Journal, scientists discovered 15,152 different species, “most of them harmless or unidentified,” nearly half of them bacteria, and 67 of those bacteria species linked to disease and infections such as staph and food poisoning.

In 18 months of scouring the entire system, [Dr. Christopher Mason] has found germs that can cause bubonic plague uptown, meningitis in midtown, stomach trouble in the financial district and antibiotic-resistant infections throughout the boroughs.

Frequently, he and his team also found bacteria that keep the city livable, by sopping up hazardous chemicals or digesting toxic waste. They could even track the trail of bacteria created by the city’s taste for pizza—identifying microbes associated with cheese and sausage at scores of subway stops.

Naturally, what some people find fascinating, MTA and city Health Department officials don’t, as noted in The New York Times.

“As the study clearly indicates, microbes were found at levels that pose absolutely no danger to human life and health,” Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said in an email. And the city’s health department called the study “deeply flawed” and misleading.

Dr. Mason responded by saying he and his team had simply presented their complete results.

“For us to not report the fragments of anthrax and plague in the context of a full analysis would have been irresponsible,” he said. “Our findings indicate a normal, healthy microbiome, and we welcome others to review the publicly available data and run the same analysis.”

Harmless or not, the long lists are enough to make you queasy and Brooklyn stations didn’t get off with shorter lists compared to their Manhattan subway counterparts.

The Sheepshead Bay – Brighton Beach – Gravesend area is pretty unsurprising in its results. There’s a whole lot of Leuconostoc citreum around, a bacteria associated with fermented cabbage, while places like the Brighton Beach subway station had bacteria associated with sunscreen. Over at the Avenue X station on the F line, in Gravesend, there’s bacteria drawn by the presence of Italian cheeses. And given our booming senior population, there’s a spike in the amount of Ochrobatrum anthropi floating around, a bacteria found on medical devices such as catheters and drainage tubes.

At least we can be thankful that the most common kind of bacteria found in the system is Pseudomonas stutzeri, a bacteria that devours toxins – leaving our subway system a wee bit cleaner. Which is more than we can say for the straphangers.