Risk assessment

Forget about Mad Cow Disease. You’re in much greater danger from your kitchen.

Professor Anderson filmed more than 100 people preparing dinner and found that only two did not cross-contaminate raw meat with fresh vegetables.
It is not only people’s hands, though. Dish towels, sinks, refrigerator door handles and warm, moist, crevice-filled sponges are also breeding grounds for bacteria. “A sponge that’s been in use for no more than two or three days in a kitchen will harbor millions of bacteria,” said Elizabeth Scott, co-director of the Simmons Center for Hygiene and Health in the Home at Simmons College in Boston. That’s a problem, she said, “if you pick up the pathogen or a pathogenic E. coli, salmonella or campylobacter on the sponge.”
She added: “That means that any time you use the sponge to wipe up a surface you are potentially spreading those pathogens.”

So why are people a lot more likely to go bonkers over one cow in Washington?

“The basic reality is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different,” said Dr. Peter M. Sandman, a risk communication consultant in Princeton, N.J. “Risks that you control,” Dr. Sandman said, “are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control. In the case of mad cow, it feels like it’s beyond my control. I can’t tell if my meat has prions in it or not. I can’t see it, I can’t smell it. Whereas dirt in my own kitchen is very much in my own control. I can clean my sponges. I can clean the floor.”
Dread is another factor, Dr. Sandman said. People can deal with sick stomachs, but they absolutely dread the idea of rotting brains.

Most people know about nuking sponges and changing their dish towels regularly. Most folks know about cutting boards, too — and a lot of what they know about those is wrong.

Professor Cliver’s other notable discovery involved cutting boards. “Somewhere along the line, wood got a bad name,” Professor Cliver said. Part of the blame, he said, must go to the rubber industry, which assailed wood cutting boards in order to promote hard rubber and plastic. In recent years, it has become conventional wisdom that plastic cutting boards are safer and easier to clean than wood cutting boards. Even the Food and Drug Administration says that plastic is less likely to harbor bacteria and easier to clean.
But 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.”

Dishwashing them doesn’t seem to do much good, either.

And while cooking food properly takes care of the food itself, the surroundings may already be contaminated.

In an experiment performed by Professor Anderson of Utah State University, she and her colleagues covered a chicken with a product called Glo Germ, which is invisible in daylight but visible when exposed to ultraviolet light. The chicken was given to a home cook, who was asked to prepare it. By the time the chicken was done, Professor Anderson said, the light revealed chicken juices everywhere — on the counter, in the sink, on cabinet handles, even on the sippy cup of the cook’s 2-year-old child.
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.

The one piece of advice that everyone seems to agree on, though, is just what your mother told you. Wash your hands in hot soapy water. Bet on it.

(via Cronaca)