
Your Kitchen Sponge Is Gross and Microwaving It Doesn't Make a Difference - rrauenza
http://www.countryliving.com/home-maintenance/cleaning/a44198/how-to-clean-kitchen-sponge/
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rrauenza
Relevant quote from the cited article:

 _Sanitation by boiling or microwave treatment has been shown to significantly
reduce the bacterial load of kitchen sponges19, 21 and can therefore be
regarded as a reasonable hygiene measure. However, our data showed that
regularly sanitized sponges (as indicated by their users) did not contain less
bacteria than uncleaned ones. Moreover, “special cleaning” even increased the
relative abundance of both the Moraxella– and Chryseobacterium–affiliated OTUs
(Fig. 3B). Presumably, resistant bacteria survive the sanitation process and
rapidly re–colonize the released niches until reaching a similar abundance as
before the treatment (Fig. 6A). This effect resembles the effect of an
antibiotic therapy on the gut microbiota40, 41, and might promote the
establishment of higher shares of RG2-related species in the kitchen sponges.
Although further analyses, including controlled sanitation experiments, are
needed to substantiate these findings, our data allow careful speculation that
a prolonged application of sanitation measures of kitchen sponges is not
advisable._

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sbierwagen
Great quote: _Recently it has been shown that in particular Moraxellaceae get
significantly enriched on cotton laundry during a domestic washing process._ I
guess laundry detergents aren't so great at lysing bacteria!

This paper didn't specifically mention _how_ sponges were microwave
sterilized, but one of the linked references specified 1 minute on "high".
(~1500W, 100% duty cycle, you'd guess) Presumably that wouldn't get any higher
than 100C. Would pressure cooker autoclaving work better? There are, of
course, bacteria that can survive autoclaves, but I don't know of any that are
also pathogenic or coliform.

