Bacteria are anything but washed up when it comes to living inside the sponges we use to clean our dishes every day. Dishwashing sponges are full of concavities, millions of them -- it's a foam -- and these concavities, all of them can host lots of different bacteria. Since the humble dishwashing sponge is found in kitchens worldwide, investigators were curious to determine just how hygienic it might be. They tested 50 sponges, each used for 3 weeks by a different housekeeper, for levels of coliform or fecal coliform bacteria (found in either soil, water or the intestinal tract) or Staphylococcus aureus, commonly found on the skin. All of these organisms can cause illness in humans.
86% of the samples showed a degree of contamination of a hundred million to one billion microorganisms of any kind per sponge.'' Fully 70% of the sponges sampled showed high levels of coliform bacteria, and 38% showed high concentrations of fecal coliform bacteria.
Before you wash your dishes, do you wash your hands?
Because sometimes people go to the bathroom and forget to wash their hands, or they change the baby's diaper and forget to wash their hands.
Most of the bacteria nestled inside sponges comes from an unsurprising source -- food left on dirty dishes, especially raw foods, like meat or poultry and vegetables.
There are things each of us can do to make kitchen sponges less attractive real estate for bugs, however.
Cutting boards can be full of crevices, and if you wash it with the sponge that's full of bacteria, you may think you are cleaning your board but you're not. You're just pushing bacteria deep into the board. And with that comes a risk for food poisoning or infection.
Annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology Orlando, FL May 21, 2001
This one is a no brainer. Why wouldn't you want to follow the above recommendations? Most of us just are not aware of how important these issues can be in contributing to illness. Nearly half of us in the US are infected by the food we eat every year and many thousands die from the infection. This is a tragedy, as many times it is so easy to prevent.
One can put the sponges in the dishwasher with the dishes. It cleans them and the hot water hopefully kills the bugs. However, there is one more effective solution.
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