BODY WATCH : Germ Warfare : Forget the bathroom and the dog’s rug. It’s the kitchen that’s the breeding ground for bacteria--and disease.

To those fastidious souls who strive to keep an immaculate house, running after dust bunnies, vacuuming faithful ly, swabbing bathrooms daily and keeping the kitchen floor so clean you could eat off it, here’s a dirty little secret: You’ve got it all wrong.

Bad as dust and dirt may seem, as stained as the toilet bowl can get or as grungy as the bathtub may look, when it comes to germs and the bacteria that cause disease in most households, none of these can hold a candle to--brace yourself--the kitchen.

Study after study shows the awful truth: The room where meals are prepared, where the family congregates, where the counters are pristine, the cabinets scrubbed and the sink sparkles, is usually the dirtiest room in the house. You just can’t see it.

And we’re not talking about mere dirt. We’re describing coliform bacteria, often food-borne pathogens derived from fecal matter.

Many of these studies have been funded by the cleaning-products industry, which is busy turning out new products to combat the problem. But before discounting the research as self-serving or simply smart marketing, realize that few other groups have had the resources to do it or have made testing of pathogens in the home a top priority in an era of diminishing dollars for all types of research.

In fact, the problem is serious enough that the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is drafting a set of guidelines for consumers on the home use of sanitizers as “tools for reducing the incidence of food-borne pathogens in the kitchen.”

Nor is this a case of a few stray bacteria. Studies consistently detect millions of these microscopic critters lurking throughout the kitchen. As University of Arizona microbiologist Charles Gerba puts it: “There’s more fecal coliform bacteria in the kitchen sink after you wash your dishes than in your toilet.”

This lovely stew of bacteria can cause diarrhea, stomach cramps, vomiting and worse. It lives--in fact, thrives--in sponges and wet dishcloths sitting in kitchens across the United States. Germs multiply unseen in sink drains, on faucets and refrigerator handles, countertops and cutting boards, even stove knobs.

And as a final insult to the super neat, to those who can’t walk through the kitchen without wiping up a crumb from the counter, studies at the University of Arizona have found that the cleanest-looking kitchens can have the highest bacterial counts, precisely because well-meaning fussbudgets inadvertently spread germs everywhere. “Being a slob helps sometimes,” says Gerba.

So why aren’t more of us getting sick more often? In fact, we probably are but just mistakenly attribute it to other things.

Paul Sockett, an epidemiologist for the Canadian government’s Laboratory Centre for Disease Control in Ottawa, found that for every reported case of the most common coliform bacterial infections--”an estimated 38 more go unreported.”

Studies from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta also document a widespread underreporting of food-borne illness, which can go unrecognized because “they can produce a spectrum of illness, from mild to severe symptoms,” says Mitchell Cohen, a microbiologist at the CDC.

Symptoms can range from mild gastrointestinal distress to full-blown vomiting and diarrhea. The very young and the very old are at greatest risk for the most severe reaction, as are those who have ailments that compromise the immune system, such as people with organ transplants, those undergoing cancer therapy or people with HIV infection.