Smartphones should be considered a threat to the nation’s biosecurity, researchers claim, after they discovered that the phones of 20 doctors attending the WONCA conference in Sydney last year harboured some 2200 dirty secrets.

A Bond University–led team decided to swab the devices, identifying some 2200 different microbes including 1229 viruses, 88 fungi and five protozoa.

Following DNA sequencing, they also discovered 124 genes for antibiotic resistance and 224 conferring virulence factors.

These included microbes belonging to “notorious” bacterial groups, such as resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella sp., Acinetobacter sp. and Pseudomonas sp.