Locus of infection sweet locus of infection

Always worried about the disease du jour? Maybe you should be looking first at your own kitchen:

. . . most people don't seem to worry about what experts say is a petri dish for food-borne illness: the home kitchen.

"Everybody is so acutely aware of mad cow disease," said Janet Anderson, a clinical associate professor of nutrition and food sciences at Utah State University, "but people aren't aware of the fact that they don't even wash their hands when they enter their kitchens, which is a much greater risk."

Professor Anderson filmed more than 100 people preparing dinner and found that only two did not cross-contaminate raw meat with fresh vegetables.

The article then passes along a useful tip: a minute or so in a microwave will effectively sterilize (cellulose) sponges (be sure they are damp first) -- though I'll probably keep bleaching them every so often just to make sure. There are also a lot of people out there who don't change their kitchen towels nearly often enough.

And though many are probably now aware that wood cutting boards are more sanitary than synthetic, this will likely be news to most:

. . . in a study Professor Cliver conducted, he found that cellulose in wood absorbs bacteria but will not release it. "We've never been able to get the bacteria down in the wood back up on the knife to contaminate food later," he said.

Plastic absorbs bacteria in a different way. "When a knife cuts into the plastic surface, little cracks radiate out from the cut," Professor Cliver said. The bacteria, he said, "seem to get down in those knife cuts and they hang out. They go dormant. Drying will kill, say, 90 percent of them, but the rest could hang around for weeks". . .

Professor Cliver found that running plastic boards through the dishwasher only spread the bacteria around. The bacteria in the cracks remained. He said that the water in dishwashers must get hotter than 140 degrees or all sorts of bacteria can survive.

Realistically, however, does one have to extirpate bacteria, or simply reduce their number to a level where they cause no mischief? Most public health experts, after all, advise that ordinary folks should stick to soap and water for hand-washing -- not at 140F, I'm certain -- and not bother with antibacterial soaps and detergents. Then there's the following:

Chuck Gerba, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona who has studied bacteria in home kitchens, said that he found that people who had the cleanest-looking kitchens were often the dirtiest. Because "clean" people wipe up so much, they often end up spreading bacteria all over the place. The cleanest kitchens, he said, were in the homes of bachelors, who never wiped up and just put their dirty dishes in the sink.

ADDENDUM: This story has been picked up elsewhere in syndication (no links available as yet -- I just saw it in our local paper's print edition), with the addition of some less-than-good advice -- such as that one should have one's hot water heater delivering water at over 140F (120F max is the recommendation to prevent burns) in order to kill bacteria in the dishwasher (and anyway, most dishwashers heat their own water).

Posted by David on January 28, 2004 6:01 PM