The difference being one your body is at peace with the other maybe not so much
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I only water rinse in between
This is pretty normal if you take human history as a whole. I think people seriously lack a good understanding of how good simple running water is at cleaning most things.
@scubadoo Just about anything will show bacterial growth when you culture it like that. I promise I won’t be grossed out.
Hmm…I refer to the smaller one (for washing) as a dish cloth and the larger (for drying) as a dish towel. I guess based on how I always heard linens for the bath differentiated - wash cloth and bath towel.
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ok, i may be a slob, but using the sponge for the toilet AND the kitchen? nuh-uh!
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I believe I would win the dirty sponge contest . How embarrassing .
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Here’s an article that likely shares its source with the radio report you heard. The takeaway is that cleaning a sponge by microwaving or dishwashing it is worse than ineffectual, it’s actually “similar to how people can encourage antibiotic resistant bacteria if they don’t follow the doctor’s orders” by taking their full course of medication. Except that that particular theory doesn’t hold water, according to this.
So! I don’t know what the hell to believe. Still not planning on replacing my kitchen sponge every week, though.
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New category: Did you ever bathe with your dish sponge?
At the temperature a wet spong is brought to in the microwave it’s unlikely that many organism will survive
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The “new study” you linked to is from 2007. It’s possible that this newer study (it was published last month) relies on more up-to-date research, to whit: “microwave and boiling treatments were shown to significantly reduce the bacterial load. However, results were contradictory, for example showing effectiveness in the laboratory, but not in used kitchen sponges, and no method alone seemed to be able to achieve a general bacterial reduction of more than about 60%.”
And here’s where I repeat that I don’t care, and I’m still keeping my sponges until they either dissolve or become sentient. And if it’s the latter, they can clean their* damn selves.
*them? “their” looks wrong
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Long article and lots to wade through. I only saw the mention of heating in the microwave but didn’t see specifics of methodology, how long where they held at what temperature
The NYT chimed in yesterday, explaining the report in layman terms.
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So sounds like bleach is the preferred method
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Funny stuff, in the last fifteen minutes of the hour: This week’s episode of the comic public radio quiz, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, touched on this. They also reported that blowing out the candles on a birthday cake is like rolling it on the floor before slicing it. I never thought about this and now it gives me the squicks, even though I am not remotely a clean freak. People eat the cake immediately after it’s been blown on. We’d recoil if someone sneezed directly onto our dessert…but don’t think about it at birthday parties. Let’s just hope the flame zaps those pathogens! 
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In Korea at most meals there’s some kind of communal soup in the middle of the table that gets shared. That means everyone is taking their saliva covered spoon and dunking it into the same liquid and redipping over and over through the meal. Absolutely horrifying by American standards but somehow those people seem to be alive and functioning.
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No, cause Helga usually gets there first:
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Back when my grandmother was washing dishes, I doubt most kitchens even had sponges. My mother learned from her. I learned from my mother. (My mother did have one of those weird “dish mops” made from a really cheap spongy material in a bursty patern at the end of a plastic handle. It was pretty useless.) I find the cloth much better than the other stuff. (I do also use a scrubbing pad if needed.)
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I would just further add that the best household biocide is Chlorine Bleach. It will kill anything, including all bacteria, molds and viruses.
It works so well that it is actually what the CDC uses to clean up accidents in biohazard level 4 facilities (Ebola monkeys, etc.)
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I would agree and have bleached on occasion but the lure of the microwave was strong
I’ll just leave this here…
Doing my job as moderator here, but this NY Times article has been posted by @small_h first here: Do you replace your dish sponge every week ? .
The same article has been mentioned 3 times in this post! @NotJrvedivici @Bookwich naughty kids that need a bit of spanking. Read, read and read!
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