Children’s ball pits – soft play haven or ‘hive of germs’?

It’s the stuff of parental nightmares – a survey claims that 99.9% of public play areas are contaminated. But is the science a load of balls?Most parents will have long suspected the ball pit at the local soft play centre of being a fetid swamp of disease and destruction, and now, according to a not entirely scientific study, it turns out 99.9% of play areas, ball pits and toys in shared public spaces are “a hive of germs”. The claim was made by Mark Hall, the managing di