Just swabbing eachother's noses!!

Swabbing a nose, seems pretty gross right. Especially when it is your own nose. You are totally self conscious about what they are going to find in there.
But for a nursing student, something like this is super exciting!!
So to begin we partnered up with another lab group. We divided our mannitol salt plate into four quadrants, one for each of us. We all got our swabs, in a sterile package so as not to be contaminated by any other bacteria.
In doing this test we were looking for the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus. Now lets swab some noses!!

Because the nose isn't as moist of an environment as our throat we first have to dip the swab in a saline solution so we can pick up the bacteria more easily.
After we dipped the swab in saline, we then put it right inside the nose, but towards the front (not far back) and putting some pressure we circled it around the walls of the nose to ensure we obtained a pure sample.
Then we are spread the swab on our quadrant of the mannitol salt plate, and put it in the incubator, at 37 degrees centigrade, which is our body temperature, and waited to see what results we would obtain.

Here are the results that we obtained!! 

Three out of the four are safe, and the bacteria cultures are not turning a yellowish culture so they are free of Staphylococcus aureus. But one of the nose samples did contain Staphylococcus aureus, we can tell because the bacteria turned a yellowish color in the mannitol salt plate. 

It was really cool to do this test to practice skills that we will be utilizing in the hospital once we are real nurses.