If every bag is as full as Nancy's, I defy even a scientist to find a single cell ... but I digress.
In your average bag lurks a purse concealing a credit or store card dirtier than an unwashed toilet bowl.
And, poo-poo all you like, ladies, but you'll have a banknote one could mistake for loo paper.
This is no attack on females - for goodness sake, I married one.
No, the same clatty claims can be laid at the door of any man. It's just that women are more fastidious than us.
And, as I know from personal experience, we don't have as many cards - or bank notes, come to that.
So don't shoot the messenger. This is the London School Of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine's verdict on one in 10 credit cards and every seventh banknote.
And there's worse. Faecal matter (yes, poo!) is on one in six mobile phones (adding new significance to washing behind your ears).
In a UK study for the fifth Global Handwashing Day, 99% of people interviewed on exiting motorway lavs claimed they had washed their hands. But electronic recording devices revealed only 32% of men and 64% of women had done so.
Plenty of folk out there could give us tips in the art of washing ones hands - Jimmy Savile's former employers, perhaps, or the Hillsborough cops.
But has the nanny state gone mad when we're warned chopping boards have 200% more faecal bacteria than toilet seats; washing machine loads carry 100million e-coli bacteria; kitchen sinks have 100,000 times more germs than a loo?
Plus, wash your hands every time you stroke a pet, and don't ever touch the magazines in your GP's surgery.
My old granny used to say: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger".
Exposure to bacteria does help build immune systems, that's why we get vaccinations.
So when allergies increase we blame centrally-heated, double-glazed living and every housewife who "kills 99% of all household germs".
But research over the last 20 years claims you can't be "too clean".
That rise in allergies is also linked to our response to microbes – and since those microbes prefer the outdoor life, stay-at-home kids are no longer on first-name terms with them.
When I was a boy, our playground included the old Corkerhill rail depot and Pollok Park woods.
From there we'd raid Pollok House's orchard (sorry!), or scrape off mud to eat raw turnip from the farmer's field.
We enjoyed a fresh air wee and seeing who could launch it highest up the trunk of a chestnut tree.
And all without washing our hands, unless you count swimming and rafting in the River Cart. Didn't seem to do our immune systems any harm.
Meantime, Nancy won't be disinfecting her cards - and the return of the plague couldn't convince her to ditch them.
nALEX SALMOND must be preening himself today, so no change there.
A weekend poll declared him seven times more popular than his nearest Scottish political rival, although like Celtic in the SPL you might say he doesn't have much to beat.
Another claimed 52% of Scots will vote Yes if Britain gets another Con-Dem coalition in 2014, while through gritted anti-nuclear teeth, the SNP conference backed him over Nato.
Salmond says removing Trident from Scotland is non-negotiable. He has two years to convince us, about that and much else.
