So Your Kitchen Sponge Is A Bacteria Hotbed. Here's What To Do

[Guest Nicole]

Back in August, a study came out about bacteria in kitchen sponges that sent home chefs into a frenzy.

But when we looked carefully at the study, we realized much of the news coverage about it was incorrect.

The study, published in Scientific Reports, undertook a thorough investigation into how many critters are living in used kitchen sponges. And the results were jawdropping.

"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.

Forty-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.

"That's a very huge number of bacteria, indeed," Egert tells NPR. "There's hardly any habitat on Earth where you'll find similar densities of bacteria, except for the human intestinal tract."

In other words, there can be spots on your kitchen sponge with just as high concentrations of bacteria as in a toilet.

Read more: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/11/548926054/can-you-really-not-clean-your-kitchen-sponge

[TrueTomHarley]

On 9/13/2017 at 1:07 AM, Nicole said:

In other words, there can be spots on your kitchen sponge with just as high concentrations of bacteria as in a toilet.

yes, but they are all warm and fuzzy friendly bacteria, who only want peace and to be loved and to be accepted for who they are.

Only when in the toilet do they come over to the dark side and plot evil....I think

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