True or False: Wearing gloves provides protection from germs.
Answer
False: Wearing gloves — whether winter gloves or the surgical kind — isn’t the best way to avoid germs. Gloves are like a second skin — they pick up the same pathogens your bare hands do. Subsequently, they can also transmit — and infect you with — harmful bugs if you touch an unclean surface and then touch your face, according to Flushing Hospital Medical Center. In other words, for gloves to serve any protective function at all, you would have to wash (or change) them as regularly as you would your ungloved hands — which pretty much defeats the purpose of wearing them.