Kitchen safety rules
Is it possible to get sick from a kitchen towel?
Kirill Stasevich, "Science and Life"
We have already written once that one of the dirtiest items in the house is a sponge for washing dishes. Last year, Scientific Reports published an article stating that in one cubic centimeter of a dish sponge, you can count more than 5x10 10 bacterial cells and that among the "sponge" microbes there are quite a lot of pathogenic, such as pathogens of pneumonia and meningitis.
Now a similar work has been done by researchers from the University of Mauritius, who counted bacteria on a kitchen towel. This, as you might guess, is also not the cleanest item in the house. The authors of the work collected a hundred towels that had not been washed for a month before, and tried to grow in the laboratory those bacteria that could be on them. About half of the towels (49%) actually had germs (at least in such quantities that they could be grown into a full-fledged laboratory culture), and most of the bacteria were on towels taken from large families or families with children.
In addition, towels that were used for different purposes – for example, wiping dishes, hands and face – turned out to be more "bacterial" than those that were used for one thing (that is, if, for example, only dishes were wiped with them). And finally, there were more germs on wet towels than on dry ones, which is quite understandable.
However, in the sense of infectious danger, kitchen towels are still quite harmless. In their report at the annual conference of the Microbiological Society, the researchers reported that in 73% of cases, the bacteria on the towels turned out to be those that live peacefully in our digestive tract, like non-pathogenic strains of E. coli and species from the genus Enterococcus.
In 14% of cases, Staphylococcus aureus (Staphylococcus aureus) was extracted from towels. We often hear about its drug-resistant strain (MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and about various diseases, sometimes quite dangerous, that arise from S.aureus; nevertheless, it usually just lives on our skin or on the mucous membrane of the respiratory tract, without causing us any concern. Moreover, there are no common pathogens of food infections, such as salmonella, or representatives of the genus There were no Campylobacter, or pathogenic varieties of E. coli on the towels. (Although it is worth noting that the same Staphylococcus aureus can provoke a food infection if it gets into food, but it can also get into it with unwashed hands.)
That is, of course, infections can spread through kitchen towels, but the infectious danger of towels, as we can see, should not be exaggerated. And there's nowhere easier to take precautions here: use towels for one thing and change them more often if you have a lot of people in your house.
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