In fact, she says, you can't draw any conclusions about the effect of washing sponges from this study.įor starters, there was no clear explanation of what "regular cleaning" meant, she says. "I feel now that the comments they make about not recommending washing in the abstract are really, really misleading." "After you contacted me for an interview, I read the study in great detail," she says. The media reports were simply not accurate. So what in the heck is going on with this new sponge study? Are the findings upturning decades of public health recommendations? We know that heating will kill the pathogens," says Jennifer Quinlan, a food microbiologist at Drexel University. You heat them up just a little bit and they literally pop! In other words, there can be spots on your kitchen sponge with just as high concentrations of bacteria as in a toilet.Īnyone who has worked with food-borne pathogens - or their close relatives - knows that these little critters aren't "the strongest." They are weaklings. "There's hardly any habitat on Earth where you'll find similar densities of bacteria, except for the human intestinal tract." "That's a very huge number of bacteria, indeed," Egert tells NPR. "We found 362 different species of bacteria, and locally, the density of bacteria reached up to 45 billion per square centimeter," says Markus Egert, a microbiologist at Furtwangen University in Germany, who led the study.įorty-five billion microbes per square centimeter? Are you kidding? If you scale that up, that's like stuffing all the people who live in Manhattan into the Rockefeller ice rink. The study, published in Scientific Reports, undertook a thorough investigation into how many critters are living in used kitchen sponges.
Despite recent news reports, there is something you can do about it.īack in August, a study came out about bacteria in kitchen sponges that sent home chefs into a frenzy.īut when we looked carefully at the study, we realized much of the news coverage about it was incorrect.
For the first time, scientists have carefully analyzed all the critters in a kitchen sponge.
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