You Should Throw Away Your Germy Kitchen Sponge Immediately. Here ’s How to Wash Your Dishes Instead

Quick — what’s the germiest room in the house? You might be surprised to learn that it’s not the bathroom. Microscopic bugs and bacteria actually favor the kitchen, where you eat and prepare food. And the nexus of all that microbial activity could be sitting right next to the kitchen sink: on the sponge. If you’re washing dishes by hand, your cups, plates and flatware may not be as clean as you think. In a 2017 study published in Scientific Reports, German researchers did a germ-analysis of kitchen sponges with some startling results. There were 362 different kinds of bacteria lurking in the crevices of sponges they collected from ordinary homes, in astounding numbers — up to 45 billion per square centimeter. (That’s about the same amount found in the average human stool sample.) Considering the size of a typical dish sponge, that’s nearly 5.5 trillion microscopic bugs crawling around on the thing you use to “clean” your dishes. That amount even surprised the researchers conducting the study. “It was one to two orders of magnitude more than we initially expected to find,” says Markus Egert, professor of microbiology and hygiene at Furtwangen University, who led the study. When Egert and his team visualized the bacteria under the microscope, the 3D impact was even more alarming. “No one had ever seen bacteria sitting inside a sponge,” he says. “One problem we have with bacteria and microbes is...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime public health Source Type: news