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CNA's award-winning investigative series Undercover Asia returns for the eighth season to uncover the hard truths in the underbelly of Asia, and help us understand the plight of the disenfranchised and the displaced.

SINGAPORE: As irony would have it, the towel used on seemingly clean skin after a shower could potentially be one of the filthiest things in your bathroom.

Justina Tan was appalled at what a lab test showed: Her bath towel, used once or twice daily, was teeming with bacteria “too numerous to count”.

She was one of eight participants whose towels were tested in a Republic Polytechnic lab, as part of a Talking Point experiment. Her towel, washed every three to four weeks, was ranked the second most bacteria-ridden towel in the group.

“I don’t think it’d be super clean, but I don’t expect it to be super dirty,” she said before the test results were announced.

Muhammad Sherefudin fared worst. He uses his towel twice a day but throws it in the wash only when it starts to smell. His sample turned out to be rife with bacteria, mould and yeast.

Like Tan, he never thought it would be “this bad”, and they are probably not alone in that.

A Talking Point poll of over 1,200 viewers found 11 per cent of them changed their towels once a month or longer, 14 per cent did so every two weeks, while half of them said they wash theirs weekly.

How often one’s towel is washed, however, is only part of the story. Some 43 per cent of respondents also said they leave their towels inside the bathroom, where there is high humidity and poor ventilation.

Elizabeth Purwadinata, for example, washes her towel weekly but leaves it to dry on a bathroom rack, which yielded the group’s third-highest bacterial count. Kai Leow, another weekly washer, was similarly dismayed that his towel was riddled with yeast microbes.