5 Dirtiest Secret Spots In Your Kitchen

[caption id="attachment_6143" align="alignleft" width="300"] Secret Dirty Spots In Your Kitchen[/caption]

You may be surprised by some of these secret spots in your kitchen that pick up a lot of germs and grime. Stay clean and healthy!

The Refrigerator Door Handle

The microbes that live on chicken, pork and beef can almost always be found on a refrigerator door handle, according to Dr. Eric E. Schadt, chairman of the department of genetics and genomics sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and chief scientific officer of Pacific Biosciences.

Germ blogger Jo Dickerson agrees, saying cross-contamination is the biggest problem in the kitchen.

Dickerson, who — in the blog "Poop on a Hot Tin Slide" — writes about her germ-focused Expression of obsessive compulsive disorder "and various other nasty phobias," said, "People probably cross-contaminate all the time in the kitchen and never realize it."

"For example," she says, "if they're preparing chicken and reach into the drawer for a fork or knife, they've gotten chicken germs on the drawer's handle and then on the utensils inside the drawer too."

Hand washing is the quickest and simplest way to prevent this contamination, says Dr. Ellen Neuhaus, director for infectious diseases for the Eastern Connecticut Health Network in Vernon, Connecticut. The problem, she says, is that many people do not know how to wash their hands correctly.

"The trick to doing proper hand hygiene is to use soap and water for 15 seconds and to shut off the faucet with a paper towel or the elbow," Neuhaus explains. "Shutting it off with the hands only recontaminates the hands with the very organisms that were on them when they opened the water faucet.

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