Dirtiest kitchen item the one used to clean

Scrubbing a dirty pan, wiping a counter, swabbing batter off the mixer — when most of us are cleaning up in the kitchen, we’re probably only thinking of the item being cleaned. But take heed: That sponge you’re using for those various tasks could be trying to kill you.

A frequently cited 2017 study published by Scientific Reports put 14 used kitchen sponges under a microscope and found a whopping 362 different species of bacteria with a density reaching up to 45 billion microbes per square centimeter.

“That’s a very huge number of bacteria, indeed,” lead scientist Markus Egert told National Public Radio in a 2017 interview. “There’s hardly any habitat on Earth where you’ll find similar densities of bacteria, except for the human intestinal tract.” Yuck.

Because they’re so porous and frequently remain damp, sponges are a perfect incubator

for all the nasties we want to keep from our food and cooking surfaces.

So does that mean you need to toss all your sponges? No, but some degree of caution is recommended.

For starters, one hard-andfast rule: Don’t use your sponges

to clean up meat juices. Stick to paper towels for that task and toss them out posthaste. And don’t keep sponges for months on end. A good rule of thumb is to discard a sponge after two weeks of use.

And that doesn’t mean you can be cavalier with your sponges

in the meantime. They require regular cleaning every few days to kill anything trying to take up residence in all those little pockets of moisture.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends two cleaning techniques that in tests proved best at killing nearly 100 percent of the bacteria present on grubby sponges.

The first is to moisten the sponge and microwave it for a minute. This was the most effective method, nuking 99.99999 percent of the bacteria to death.

The second most effective trick is to run your sponges through the dishwasher set to a hot drying cycle. That proved essentially as effective as microwaving, killing 99.9998 percent of present bacteria.

Soaking sponges in a liquid bleach solution, lemon juice or water were found to be far less effective, so if that’s your routine, consider changing it in the name of safety.

A note on eco-friendly sponges made from loofah, cotton, hemp, wood cellulose, natural sponges harvested from the ocean and various other materials instead of the synthetic ones most of us use: While some of these materials can take the heat of the microwave, others, such as natural sponge, will shrink and harden. Others might burn, as in the case of cellulose.

Bottom line: Stick to the dishwasher to sanitize sponges made from Earth-friendly materials.

Emilija Manevska / Getty Images Sponges should be cleaned every couple of days and discarded after two weeks.