"Anyone who has worked with food-borne pathogens — or their close relatives — knows that these little critters aren't "the strongest." They are weaklings. You heat them up just a little bit and they literally pop!
"That's why we cook food. We know that heating will kill the pathogens," says Jennifer Quinlan, a food microbiologist at Drexel University.
So what in the heck is going on with this new sponge study? Are the findings upturning decades of public health recommendations?...
In the new study, cleaning apparently boosted the levels of two species. Egert has no idea exactly what these species are, but one is related to bacteria that give your dirty laundry that stinky, musty smell. The other is related to bacteria that, on rare occasions, cause infections in people with suppressed immune systems. Neither of these relatives are known to cause food poisoning."
Ugh. There needs to be a blog that finds an expert to read these headlines-studies in detail and then breaks them down for us. Like, we don't each individually have the time to go scrounging deep in the supplementary materials and even though I'm a molecular biologist, I don't know enough about bacterial species to know how to judge if one is dangerous or not.
FB: (pretend this is still topical, it's from like a year ago)""What really irked me is that you had to go all the way into the supplemental material to find how people reported washing the sponges," Quinlan says. "Even then the methods were very vague."... The study also looked at only five sponges that people said they "cleaned" regularly — and study participants did not say whether this cleaning took place in the microwave or in soapy water. "We do not want to make public health recommendations based on five sponges from Germany," Quinlan says."
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