Not enough things to worry about? Consider the killer dishwasher.

Like every else, I maintain all sorts of lists – online, on laptop, on paper, on file card, and in my head.

There’s the to-do list, condo association edition – as in, see if I can get the condo association off its collective arse to get the front door and the window sashes painted).

There’s the to-do list, inside-our-condo edition – and yes, dear family, there will be some type of door handle on the upstairs bathroom door by Christmas-tide.

There’s the to-do list, personal – as in get our wills updated.

I have list of to-do’s for my clients, and each week do an overall w/o list on yellow pad, which I add things to and check things off of throughout the week. And the list of things I have to do for St. Francis House (where I’m a board member), and for The Writers’ Room of Boston (where I, unfortunately, ignored the list that clearly said “Don’t let yourself get elected president.”)

Blog post ideas. Story ideas (in hopes that at some point I will actually spend a bit of time on fiction). Books to read. Presents-cards to pick up. (Note: Julie’s wedding gift was sent through the registry; be sure to snail-mail the card.)

Staples list (reminder: you DON’T need any more staples). CVS list (see if they have OPI French Cognac in case most recent pedicure gets chipped). Whole Foods list (why do I bother; I pretty much get the same things every time). Peapod list (online, so it takes care of the same things every time problem for me).

Of course, there’s the bucket list. (See Venice and live…)

And then there’s my fret lists, the list of things immediate and familial, and the list of things American and political, and the list of things global and existential.

As a natural born worry wart, there’s a whole lot of frettin’ going on in my skull at any given time. And now, thanks to my brother-in-law Rick, who obviously has nothing better to do than to dig up scares from the UK papers, I now know that there’s no safe harbor or safe harbour in the common household dishwasher.

They’re apparently:

…the perfect breeding ground for fungi associated with potentially deadly illnesses.

The moist and hot environment, combined with the alkaline water caused by the dishwasher tablets, means that the machines appear to have created a previously unknown and possibly serious threat to human health, the research paper [cited] has suggested.  Source: Telegraph.

And it’s not just in the UK that evil lurks in the heart of the dishwasher. The study, which was published in Fungal Biology, a scholarly journal focused on, well, fungal biology, looked at:

…189 domestic dishwashers in 101 different cities around the world. They found 62 per cent of dishwashers contained fungi on the rubber band in the door. More than half of these included the black yeasts Exophiala dermatitidis and E. phaeomuriformis which are known to be dangerous to human health.

In addition to those black yeasty gaskets, the scientists found black yeast on the supposedly clean dishes and cutlery.

The scientists – Dr. Polona Zalar and Nina Gunde-Cimerman  - said that they “just don’t know how serious this could be.”

Pretty darned serious if you have cystic fibrosis, which fortunately I do not. But occasionally fatal in healthy humans, of which I am one – especially now that I’ve cleaned the black gunk out of the rubber gaskets in the fridge. Could it have been black yeast?

Well, now I have to add checking the dishwasher gasket to my in-house to-do list.

A girl could blow a gasket, what with all these lists.

Meanwhile, the article couldn’t resist larding on other scary news:

Which?, the consumer group, found that computer keyboards contained five times as many bugs as a lavatory on average.

Okay, where in the lavatory? Sink? Tub? Medicine cabinet? Hamper? Toilet seat?

I mean, should I start wearing surgical gloves while blogging?

…tests on shoppers’ bags, by the University of Arizona, revealed half contained traces of E.coli, the food poisoning bug that killed over 20 people in Europe over the last month.

Okay, what type of shoppers’ bags? Bad-for-the environment, handle-breaks-if-you-put-in-two-cans-of-crushed-pineapple plastic ones? Old-fashioned brown paper ones? My own personal, virtuous, no thanks, I have my own bags kind of shoppers’ bags?

Sheeesh.

Some days, I just want to stay in bed with the covers pulled up over my head. But then I think of all those mites that reside in there because I haven’t boiled my mattress cover in a while…

Up and at those lists!