Your kitchen sponge contains bacteria that may cause diseases like typhoid, plague, cholera and food poisoning

Sponge sanitation methods like microwaving and boiling the sponge might help share 'risk group 2 bacteria'.

By: Shaloo Tiwari | | Updated: July 3, 2018 5:42 pm

Surprised that your wife is regularly washing utensils? Or, your husband is ironing clothes all by himself? Well, the secret is 56 calories are burnt when you wash dishes or iron clothes for 20 minutes.

If you thought using the dish-washing sponge to making your dishes germ-free is enough; you’ll be shocked to know that the sponge you use for cleaning your dishes has a host of bacteria that can make you ill severely. Recently, a study[1] found that the dish-washing sponge that you use does much harm to your health. Kitchen sponges, owing to their porous nature and water-soaking capacity become incubators for the different microorganisms. In the research, the researchers took DNA samples from 14 different used kitchen sponges and analysed it and discovered dominance of bacterial class called Gammaproteobacteria which includes human pathogens that can cause severe diseases like typhoid, the plague cholera and food poisoning.

And if you thought cleaning the sponge by the various method is enough, you must rethink. In a previous study, sponge sanitation methods like microwaving and boiling the sponge might help increase the ‘risk group 2 bacteria’ which may cause a host of human diseases.
In the dense part of the sponge, the researchers discovered a sugar-cube sized piece of bacteria contained 54 billion bacterial cells. The researchers in the study say, ‘Boiling, dishwashing, and the use of the washing machine were the only methods of treatment that were statistically significantly different than the control group, which did not undergo any treatment. In contrast, the microwave at both 30 seconds and 60 seconds showed no a significant difference from the control.’ And further suggested, “We therefore rather suggest a regular (and easily affordable) replacement of kitchen sponges, for example, on a weekly basis.”

[1] Cardinale, M., Kaiser, D., Lueders, T., Schnell, S., & Egert, M. (2017). Microbiome analysis and confocal microscopy of used kitchen sponges reveal massive colonization by Acinetobacter, Moraxella and Chryseobacterium species. Scientific Reports, 7.

Published: August 2, 2017 11:19 am | Updated:July 3, 2018 5:42 pm

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