This work was basically looking at whether it would be hygienic for a human to use an MRI machine after it was used on a dog. The methodology used swabbing to determine CFU load, and looked for pathogenic microbes in the samples.

It's important to note that bacterial load doesn't equate to being intrinsically "dirtier", as news articles have stated. It's also useful to consider that robust genetic analyses weren't used to quantify microbial community composition or pathogenic potential among screened microbes. I also thought it was interesting that while they recovered more possibly pathogenic microbes from humans, the difference between dogs and humans wasn't statistically significant.

I don't love beards, but most news articles misrepresented the objective and results of this research.