To be terrified of addicts contaminating baby changing tables?

[SpikyCactus]

Apparently drug addicts are using baby changing tables to shoot up drugs. So changing your baby could expose them to fatal traces of drugs or infected blood.

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6208231/Indiana-mother-reveals-shocking-truth-black-marks-left-babys-changing-table.html

AIBU to be utterly terrified?

change baby on the floor, its probably cleaner lol

My local newspaper carried a story last weekend about how drug addicts were allegedly 'cleaning' their needles in the holy water font in a local Catholic church.
Is holy water ten times more powerful than bog standard water?

lol

Rubbish

Nice attempt to drive traffic to your website, Daily Mail. But you don't fool Mumsnet that easily.

I suffer from anxiety, so sympathise as prone to irrational thought. Honestly though, you can't go through life panicking about miniscule what ifs (I speak from experience.)
Take your own portable changing mat or a towel in your changing bag and put that down first.
Try not to panic over rare news articles as sometimes it's blatant scaremongering and you have to think of the reason they make the news - because they aren't the norm and are in fact so rare.

Surely you wipe the table before using anyway and then put something on top? Not the most cleanest of things to begin with.

weird that you dont have wet wipes at hand and clean the change table before you put your baby down... i mean lots of people use them and a few id imagine dont give a shit if they leave it looking a bit feral... common sense really, give it a wipe and all is well with your world

I agree just wipe it. There’s a huge McDonald’s in the city centre where I live and numerous times I’ve been waiting to use the baby change/disabled facility and someone’s come out and the smell of heroin use has been really strong. I just wipe everything down

Exactly. Put a changing mat down.

Woman puts scaremongering rubbish on Facebook shocker.

Surely you clean it first then put down a changing mat.

Use your own changing mat from the nappy bag. Most places lock the disabled/baby change rooms at night.

I wouldn’t be terrified I would just be cautious. ;)

Anxiety.

Classic tabloid scaremongering.

Tabloids are best avoided if, like me, you have anxiety issues!

Use a changing mat. At least you are not having to change your child on the floor.

Yes YABU. Never heard of anything bad happening to a baby from a contaminated changing table.

The fruit thing has made me cautious. I now cut fruit up smaller for dd. But she’s getting older herself so would realise something was wrong. I always wiped over changing mats and in this case would just systematically use a travel one over the top of the ones provided. You could even put the mat to the side and use your own.

Most people changing a baby would have wipes with them, goes without saying that you would surely give the mat or table a quick wipe.

That's without even considering drugs.

You can buy disposable bed mats. The ones sold and marketed towards incontinent adults are a lot cheaper than the baby change mats.

I carry one of those around in the changing bag so that if I changing table looks like it isn't clean I'll use that. It happens very rarely - I'm still on the first pack of 25 and DD is 16m!

I'd worry more about germs from other babies' nappies than drugs though!

I was always terrified of poo germs being on the changing tables so would wipe them and put a mat down anyway.

Well mine all survived and i didn't always wipe them down. I dont think people need to worry about this.

Eh? How exactly would it infect your baby?
Please see your GP re your extreme anxiety.

This is the kind of thing I might have fixated on when I was struggling with anxiety. As suggested above, if worries like this are impacting your life then please see your GP.

This is the sort of thing I’d normally roll my eyes at, especially as it’s in the Daily mail but I found the remnants of two lines of coke on a changing table in a sports facility last year. Horrified!

I still shudder slightly when I remember the Hellraiser/Poonami mash-up that DS produced mid-nappy change on the changing table of Pizza Express, when he was 3 or 4 months old. How can such a small being produce such gigantic quantities of pooh all at once?! Obviously I left it clean to the eye, but it probably wasn't sterile 🤦‍♀️ And Lord have mercy on the poor sod that followed us in. They probably thought it was me

I'd think that's a more likely changing table scenario, frankly (and always carried a travel mat when he was little).