Here's another reason to carefully wash your kitchen cutting board - a new study suggest that kitchen butting can become contaminated with drug-resistant germs.
Published in the Journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the study revealed that cutting boards are among the primary items that can become infected with bacteria, which comes from meat carrying the particularly antibiotic-resistant bacteria E. coli.
Led by Dr. Andreas Widmer of the University Hospital of Basel, researchers analyzed154 cutting boards from the University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland and 44 cutting boards from private homes, after they were used to prepare "pork, beef/veal, lamb, game or fish." The boards were collected before they had been washed.
The team found that 6.5 percent of the hospital cutting boards used to prepare poultry tested positive for "multidrug-resistant E. coli bacteria," Healthday reported. The study also found that 3.5 percent of the household cutting boards were contaminated with the E. coli bacteria.
None of the cutting boards used to prepare the other meat and fish were contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria. The cutting boards used to prepare the other meat and fish had no trace of drug-resistant bacteria.
The researchers also examined 20 gloves used by hospital kitchen employees to handle raw poultry were also tested and found that 50 percent of the gloves were contaminated with multidrug-resistant E. coli.
"The spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria has been associated with the hospital setting, but these findings suggest that transmission of drug-resistant E. coli occurs both in the hospital and households," study author Dr. Andreas Widmer said in a journal news release. "Our findings emphasize the importance of hand hygiene, not only after handling raw poultry, but also after contact with cutting boards used in poultry preparation."
A recent study from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that foods other than poultry can also put a person at risk of suffering food poisoning, with spinach and other leafy greens being the largest source of food poisoning.
