Touching things when travelling

The part of your original post that I find interesting is that you indicate that you are extra vigilant while traveling. Maybe I am misreading it, but aren't all of the surfaces that you mentioned similarly grimy in your home town? However, as far as I am concerned, wipe away - it will make things cleaner for the rest of us!

I suspect that normal gloves are probably as filthy and germ ridden as anything you're touching. That's unless you're wearing disposable latex gloves.

You hold on to dirtry stanchions of public transit, well let me tell you, I was a supervisor for a large metropolitian transit system, and my job was on the road taking care of any problems, as management did not want to hear about them. One of your jobs was to go to a transit vehicle where someone had thrownup, or had urinated on the seat or even did something more than just urinated, our job was to clean it up. for throwup, we laid down small paper chips to soak it up, the same with urine, and for soiled seats we just took a rag and wiped it off. Care to sit on it now? Dirty filthy public transportation and ours was not the only one.