|
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.
-
Leave
your sponge very dry and without any residue of organic
material.
-
Clean
the sponge after you wash the dishes.
-
And
keep it away from the cutting board.
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
| 