Something For Everyone . . .

What’s the dirtiest place in your house? If you knew it was dirty, you’d clean it, right?

The dirty spots easiest to overlook are:

1. Can opener. The cutting wheel on a can opener gets caked with dried food for years.  Small pieces fall into food you open later, so you eat it.  Yuck. Look at the cutter and you’ll be totally grossed out.  Clean and rinse it with a brush, a toothpick, whatever . . .  Manufacturers typically do not recommend you put a can opener in the dishwasher, or even wash it, to prevent it from rusting.

While you’re in the kitchen, there are two more grungy spots.

First is your sponge or dishcloth.  They’re damp and contain tiny bits of food.  This is a perfect breeding spot for bacteria, which are spread to anything you wipe.  Some sponges have an anti-bacterial chemical added to them for just this reason; Costco sells giant packages of them.

Just rinse and wring your sponge often to get the bits of food out.  Wash the sponge in the dishwasher, always rinse it well and store it in the sunlight (the ultraviolet in sunlight kills germs).  Replace sponges every few weeks; use the old one for cleanups on floors, bathtubs, outdoors, pets, etc.  Never touch a kitchen sponge or dishcloth to a wooden cutting board.  Throw the dishcloth in the laundry every few days.

Next, wash your wooden cutting board once a month with a solution of 1/2 teaspoon of laundry bleach in 2 cups of water to kill germs that can contaminate food and can cause food poisoning.  If the surface is really rugged, consider wet-sanding it, with the grain, with fine sandpaper to keep food from getting trapped in the cuts.  Bleach is very powerful — always dilute it, and don’t get it on your clothes or anything else (obviously).  Restaurants routinely use a diluted, powdered, bleach product to rinse cooking utensils.

Bacteria are all around us.  Typically, they’re harmless if we handle foods properly.  We get into trouble when we mix the harmless bacteria from one food on to another kind of food, then give it a chance to grow there.  Cutting meat on a cutting board, then cutting cheese on the same board is an example.  Or handling raw vegetables, then raw chicken.

Rinse utensils and hands after handling any raw protein (meat, dairy products, chicken, fish, etc.) and before handling any raw foods.  Don’t use utensils to handle raw foods and then cooked foods without rinsing.  Raw meat (especially chicken) contains bacteria that are looking for a place to grow.  Rinse that fork or tongs while you’re waiting for food to cook. Food poisoning is one of those things that sneaks up on you.  When someone tells you they had the “24-hour flu” you’ll know there’s no such thing.  They were poisoned.  Small children and the elderly can die from food poisoning.

2. Light Switches on the wall.  Since we know where the light switches are in our home, we don’t look at them.  Our visitors and guests, however, are shocked to see how dirty they get.  Be gentle — you can scrub the paint right off the cover plate if you’re too ambitious.  If you find a greasy spot that won’t come off, try a little Soft Scrub or even rubbing alcohol. (Soft Scrub works great on old bathtub stains, too.)  An alternative is to replace ordinary switch covers with brass or other metal covers, which don’t hold dirt as easily as paint.

3. Washing machine.  Those “skid marks” on underwear carry e. coli bacteria.  Put them in the washer and the bacteria just gets spread around, not killed.  You’d think they’d just get rinsed away, but research shows they contaminate the washer and subsequent laundry.  Put a little bleach in with your whites, and use Pine-Sol or a similar disinfectant with other loads.  Some recommend just running an empty cycle (with detergent) every month or two to help rinse out the tub.

NEVER mix any cleaning agent with bleach or ammonia — these are very powerful chemicals that can actually become lethal if mixed with other cleaning supplies.  Always dilute bleach; the fumes alone can quickly overpower you and damage lung tissue.

4. Carpet right by the door. Dirt, oil and sand get tracked in on people’s shoes.  The bulk of it lands right by the door.  Over the years, this area gets dark from dirt and oil, and worn from sand cutting the fibers off like sandpaper.  Vacuum here more than average to get up the sand, or put down a throw rug to lengthen carpet life and appearance.  If you have oil spots on your driveway or parking areas, people will bring in oil on their shoes.  Get a bag of oil-dry from any automotive supply or just buy a small bag of cheap, clay-based kitty litter.  Rub some into the concrete with the bottom of your shoe and the oil spot will just disappear, then sweep it away (or just leave it to catch the next stain). Watch where you walk in parking lots, too; you’ll be astonished at the wet, caked oil slicks you’ll find in popular parking spots and under drive-thru windows.

Some people dwell on dust mites, disinfectant hand soaps, and Lysol or similar products.

Dust mites are microscopic cousins of spiders.  They’re alive and thriving on your body right now, typically at the base of your eyelashes.  They’re completely harmless (unless you get nightmares from their photos), but some people are allergic to their poop.  If so, Kirby vacuum cleaners, which have monstrous sucking power through their attachments, go for under $200 used on eBay (even new ones are 20% off retail there), or check your local Craigslist .  Concentrate on bedding and mattresses to get the biggest benefit, or just clean them with your current vacuum attachments for some relief.  In the worst allergy cases, replace pillows each year with synthetic materials.

Technically, you’re cleaning up their feces and your microscopic dead skin particles that the mites eat.  If you’re a tough sell, you can have a Kirby salesman come to your home and demonstrate this bed-sucking technique, but you’ll be hard pressed to say “no” to their tough sales pitch for a new, $900 (yikes!) vacuum cleaner.  They may give you $50 for your old one as a gimmick to clinch the sale. wow.

Antibacterial cleaners containing Triclosan (which is now found inside three out of four Americans’ bodies, according to the CDC — Centers for Disease Control) and hand soaps are believed by many to be hazardous.  The CDC states they are not “demonstrably useful in the healthy household.”  They have no effect on viruses.  They may eliminate the “friendly” bacteria in our bodies, which are necessary for us to live and are a vital part of our immune system.  Products containing Triclosan can be useful in health care facilities where infections are common, patients are infectious or have reduced immune response, and where MRSA bacteria are found. They kill almost all germs, but the tiny fraction that’s left over is now resistant to that chemical and has a big, clear playing field to grow on (your hands and your home) since you just wiped out all of their competitors.

This is genetic engineering, creating new, resistant varieties of bacteria in your kitchen or bathroom and on your hands.  Instead, just use plain soap and water and wash your hands frequently.  Also try to avoid disinfectants in sprays and liquids with a 0.001% active ingredient you can’t even read, let alone pronounce.  These are typically crude oil by-products, and by definition, are very, very powerful toxins.  They can also create super-bugs and jeopardize everyone’s health.  You’re not performing surgeries in your home.

No discussion of dirty spots in your home would be complete without mentioning the way we get a cold or the flu.

A.  Someone with a cold or flu is oozing the virus in their runny nose, watery eyes and sneezing.  They get the virus on their hands from touching their eyes and nose, sneezing into their hand, or handling tissues.

B.  Next, they touch a surface (countertop, handle, doorknob, handrail, keyboard, etc.) and deposit the virus there along with some oil from their skin. This is critical; the virus needs that oil to survive until you happen along.  Within a few minutes or hours, the oil dries up and the virus dies.

C.  You come along and touch the same surface.  You get the virus on your hands, and then touch your eyes, mouth, or nose. That’s when you get a dose.  If you wash your hands with soap often, and refrain from touching your face, you’ll be far less likely to get sick.  Cleaning common surfaces with ordinary soap and water removes the oil, and the virus dies.

D.  Shaking hands with someone with a cold?  Don’t touch your face until you get a chance to wash up.  No harm, no foul.

E.  Using anti-bacterial cleaners is pointless.  They have no effect on viruses that cause colds and flu.

For extra credit, don’t grab any more door handles than you have to.  Push building doors open with your forearm, pull a slightly-open door by its edge.  Pull public restroom doors open with a paper towel to avoid a whole host of bad boys from e. coli to hepatitis.  Pull on a door handle or push an elevator button with any part of your hand you won’t use to rub your eyes or nose later.

Tell your friends,

Charlie Gosh

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