by Laura Falin posted in Life

The thing no one warned me about when I became a parent was the amount of wiping. Faces, noses, tables, computer screens, chairs, coffee tables, bottoms, bottoms, bottoms. So. Much. Wiping.
It's no wonder I have disposable wipes of all kinds around here. Electronic wipes, baby wipes, face wipes, Lysol wipes. I even have some special stainless steel wipes for my fridge. The only thing I haven't been able to find a suitable wipe for is my dishes. I use a very questionable kitchen sponge for those. Every time I use it, I wonder whether I'm actually cleaning things, or just helping the bacteria in the sponge to get around my kitchen even faster than it would on its own.
This article has my answer. In a nutshell, the average kitchen sponge has a crapload of bacteria on it. This might be my favorite quote: "We found 362 different species of bacteria, and locally, the density of bacteria reached up to 45 billion per square centimeter," says Markus Egert, a microbiologist at Furtwangen University in Germany, who led the study.
Well, that's a party right there.

Do not despair, however. Despite the discoveries at Furtwangen University, you're probably not at risk of infecting your entire household with awful diseases. There are actually only five species of bacteria that cause more than 90 percent of hospitalizations from foodborne illness...and they're not usually found on sponges.
Jennifer Quinlan, a food microbiologist at Drexel Univer...