Though I don’t consider myself a total slob, I’m not exactly the cleanest person on the planet, either. Consider me an average clean freak. Every once in a while, I let things go unsanitary a little bit too long. Despite my sometimes lax approach to constant spotlessness, I always have a point where there are enough piles, disarray, filth, germs and plain dirtiness beyond toleration.
Fortunately, I’ve found out some things that might make us all think twice about the germs we encounter every day and, say, using that sponge in the kitchen longer than it should be used.
Home is where the heart is, and this is very much true for germs. Many different studies have concluded that the home or apartment is actually the easiest way to become exposed to harmful bacteria and viruses including ones that cause colds, the flu and other various illnesses. According to nationally renowned physician Joseph Mercola, “65 percent of colds, 50 percent of all cases of diarrhea and 50 percent to 80 percent of food-borne illnesses are caught in the home.”
The kitchen is a place that often gets neglected. The sponge on the kitchen sink is public enemy number one. In fact, it should probably be thrown away today.
Mercola conducted a test on 50 sponges used for a three-week period by different housekeepers. According to Mercola’s results, “86 percent of the samples showed a degree of contamination of a hundred million to one billion microorganisms of any kind per sponge.” More disturbingly, Mercola found that “70 percent of the sponges sampled showed high levels of coliform bacteria (namely E. coli), and 38 percent showed high concentrations of fecal coliform bacteria.”
Mercola concluded that most of the bacteria found on sponges came from people not washing their hands or unsanitary dishes that had raw meat exposed to them. Neil Schachter of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City suggested wetting your sponge and microwaving it on high for two minutes to kill harmful bacteria.
I’m not sure how I feel about microwaving my sponges. Basically, don’t keep that sponge for too long because it’s impossible to know where everybody else’s hands have been.
Dishrags aren’t much cleaner when left moist. In fact, a wet dishrag is not any more sanitary than a dirty sponge. The germs just transfer from one kitchen item to another (sponge to plate, plate to towel). Schachter noted that germs on a dishrag can only survive when moist, so let the towel dry before reusing it.
In another gross claim, Mercola said there are up to 200 times more fecal bacteria on your cutting board than on your toilet seat. Germs on the cutting board are most often the result of improper sanitation after cutting raw meats on it.
There are other kitchen items in your home or apartment that are particularly gross, too, but are probably overlooked as far as how dirty they actually could be. Those same dirty hands that just came out of the bathroom are also touching the sink faucets, refrigerator handles, stove handles, trash cans, door knobs, light switches, kitchen gadgets, counters and anything else that can be manipulated with human hands.
Charles Gerba of the University of Arizona reminds people to keep dirty hands off the family phone as well and to sanitize it when possible. Gerba provides an example of where someone might be cooking without properly washing their hands, think to call someone on a recipe and thus contaminate the phone as well. The bacteria grows from there.
Think about all of the places in an apartment where germs are just waiting to leave humans bed-ridden. Imagine all of those little creepers crawling through the ins and outs of that sponge right now. It’s rather nauseating.
Think about how many germs are on a computer keyboard after you come home from class each day. Or even worse, with as much as we do with our cell phones, think about how dirty those things are. They go everywhere, get dropped on the dirtiest of floors, get used by other people, have the same germs we have on our hands from campus each day and get rubbed up against an ear all the time. Perhaps we should all take a disinfectant wipe to our phones once in a while.
Despite some of this data being slightly alarming, all of the sources mentioned argued that washing your hands well and often is an easy and effective way to protect yourself. Keeping the home or apartment clean is important, but washing your hands helps keeps germs away from the handles and sponges to begin with. There is way too much grime in our everyday lives to avoid a good hand scub.
— Oliver Casey is a junior in enterprise management. He can be reached at [email protected].
