You've reached the every little thing helpline. Please leave your message after the tone.

I am wondering about sponges. I think they're pretty disgusting, but I'm still using them

and I'm not sure if I should be. Please, it's pretty pressing.

Kitchen sponges. Are they irredeemable germ traps? To find out, I called three food science experts.

Yep, my name is Professor Ian Shaw. My name is Catherine Boer. My name is Renee Goodrich. I'm a professor.

And even though they work in food safety, all insisted they are extremely chill when it comes to food and food prep.

One of my great joys in life is traveling the world and trying the food. That's local.

I will happily eat out of any food truck or food cart. I refuse point blank to think about anything negative when I'm making food.

Like I said, extremely chill except when it came to the S word.

Are you particular about your sponges? Yes.

That may be one area where being a food scientist does have an impact on my life.

The big problem with sponges is that they, you know, they're porous and if you've been using them to wash your dishes or whatever,

bits of food get inside so the bacteria have an absolute heyday.

Heyday doesn't begin to cover it.

One study found 54 billion bacteria in a cubic centimeter of sponge.

That's close to the bacterial density of a human stool sample.

But as we know, not all bacteria are dangerous.

Really, it would have to be a kind of perfect storm scenario.

You're prepping a turkey. You soak up some salmonella in your sponge and then you wipe your counters with it, spreading that bacteria all over your kitchen.

So how do experts minimize the risk of the perfect salmonella storm?

My sponge practices to change the sponges on a very frequent basis.

Like how frequent is very frequent about every two days.

...