stop sprinkling when you're tinkling.

salon :: :: col :: roac :: Ladies who spray, By Mary Roach :: Page 1 There is no rational reason -- other than avoiding someone else's mess -- not to sit down on a toilet seat. You cannot catch venereal disease by pressing the back of your thigh and butt cheeks to a piece of plastic where someone else's thigh and butt cheek have been pressed. Catching VD requires direct contact. In order to catch VD from a toilet seat you would have to rub your crotch on the toilet seat in precisely the same place that someone else has previously rubbed her contaminated crotch.

"It's a lovely thought," says Alan Copperman, director of reproductive endocrinology at Mount Sinai Medical Center, "but it doesn't happen."

To be absolutely certain, I called the American Social Health Association -- "social health" being a euphemism for sexually transmitted diseases (STD) -- to see what they had to say on the topic. I had been referred to them by an editor at Self magazine, which recently ran a piece advocating crouching above the toilet seat to avoid contracting trichomoniasis, a common bacterial vaginal infection. (Thank you, Self magazine!) But neither ASHA nor the CDC's STD hotline said they knew of any study documenting the transmission of trich in this manner. They said it might be possible to catch trich from sharing the wet towel or bathing suit of someone who's infected, but not from sitting on a toilet seat.