Australia's Science Forum

Casual teacher taking a science class. "Miss, can we open the petri dishes? We can't see because of the condensation." Teacher didn't know any better, so they opened exposed plates. When I found out, I booted them out of the room for a bit, opened the windows, turned on the fans and sprayed everything with 70% ethanol. Got them to use hand sanitiser too. Chucked the plates in the pressure cooker. Very glad for my mask today. Filled out an incident report form and waited for my heart rate to return to normal.....

Well done! I was told by a virologist that unless we use blood agar we wont grow any viruses or animal diseases. But breathing in some of the bacteria and mould we grow cant be good.

There are a lot of bacterial infections that will cause you harm! Why we should never incubate at body temperature and why we never open plates.

We would not let casual teachers do experiments at all. never