Well there you go. You try to do something good, something to help the environment. And what happens? You get slapped with a nasty dose of e.coli (that’s a nasty toxin that can kill). At least that’s what food safety experts at the University of Arizona claim.
According to their tests, reusable plastic bags – or bags for life, as we like to call them – are positively teeming with nasty bugs like salmonella and, yes, e.coli (which the story in today’s Mail likes to point out killed 26 people in Scotland in a food-poisoning outbreak in 1996). Oh dear, something else to get completely riskfactorphobic about then.
So what can you do? Well according to the Arizona team, you should thoroughly wash or bleach – yes, bleach – your shopping bags every week. Flipping heck, as if we don’t have enough to do.
Some other pointers when using reusable bags include separating raw foods (by which I assume they mean meat, fish etc) from other foods, not storing bags containing meat or produce (fresh fruit and veg) in your car boot to avoid the high temperatures that help nasty bacteria from thriving, and not using your lovely bags for life for other purposes ‘such as carrying books of gym clothes’.
Of course, this probably means that all your shopping bags – not just the dear old bags for life – are today’s public health enemy number one. As for handbags, I’d hate to find out what was growing inside mind (I forgot to bleach mine this week, what an idiot). Sometimes, as they say, ignorance is bliss.