The Canadian Environment and Plastics Industry Council publicized the results of a study last week showing that reusable shopping bags make a happy dwelling place for yeast, mold, and bacteria including coliforms. You can read the news story here. A little moisture gets trapped, meat and unwashed veggies go in and out of the bags, checkers handle one set of bags after another, spreading everything around… ew!
Does the scenario sound a bit familiar? A couple years ago, an article in the Journal of Environmental Health related finding 25 different species of bacteria on restaurant beverage lemon slices. In reaction to that news, one of our ID Epi students at the time said that her science students had done a project that found high levels of bacterial growth on restaurant soda machines.
This is all an example of us interacting with our environment and the agents there to create potential new modes of disease transmission. The epidemiologic importance, however, at this point is limited, and begs a few questions. Are the bugs colonizing these items, be they lemons or grocery bags, pathogenic? And if they are pathogenic, is anyone ever getting sick?
I’ve yet to read about a restaurant-lemon outbreak, but if you’ve seen one, let me know. In the mean time, wash out your reusable grocery bags every once in a while.
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