If you don't change it often enough, your kitchen sponge may be hiding something rough.

Take a look at your kitchen sponge and see what you let it do all day. Sure, it washes dishes, but it also cleans counters, removes crumbs from tables, and removes jelly from your kids' faces.

While washing everything else with soap and warm water, the sponge itself gets washed, right? Not exactly.

Sponges have bacteria in them.

All the holes (called pores) in a sponge can hold food and bacteria, and warm water can help them grow.white eraser sponge One study found that there are up to 45 million bacteria in a square centimeter of kitchen sponge. These 45 million bacteria are made up of 362 different species of bacteria, although most of them do not make people sick.

Another study found that 77% of sponges contained E. coli, an interesting little family of bacteria that includes Salmonella and E. coli. By comparison, in this study, 5% of toilets in the same household had E. coli.

When should I throw out the sponge?

When you clean surfaces like production kitchen counters, you want to make sure that your sponge city is free of nasty bacteria like Salmonella and E. coli from the cultural communication study.

Most experts recommend throwing out kitchen sponges after a week - two weeks at the most.

How do you know if your sponge needs cleaning? It's simple:Look at it and smell it. If you can see or smell food, or residue from spills you cleaned up the day (or week) before, the sponge needs to be thrown out.

You may have heard that microwaving a sponge kills bacteria, but it doesn't kill all of them and the rest can continue to multiply in the sponge.

To clean a sponge

Heat a wet sponge in the microwave for two minutes.

Put the sponge city in the top dishwasher to clean it, including the drying process.

Soak the sponge in a solution of half a teaspoon of bleach and 0.94 liters of water.

Although cleaning the sponge is possible, the safest thing to do is to throw away the old sponge and replace it with a new one.