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COVID-19 Food Safety Tips: Don’t Clean Food With Bleach!

We’ve covered the basics of food safety and food handling under the COVID-19 pandemic in this space before, but I thought it important to make mention of a ‘trend’ that new surveys are revealing: folks are washing food in bleach. And that’s a very bad idea, in spite of what some politicians may advise…

Trump Says Drink Bleach - © White House Press PoolU.S. President Donald Trump’s staff supporters on the podium were dumbstruck
when he suggested that people drink bleach to treat COVID-19.

Remember the uproar when U.S. President Donald Trump, at a White House news conference, suggested drinking or injecting bleach as a means of treating COVID-19? That’s totally nuts, of course. Even diluted, it would kill, or at least severely injure you. Real food safety experts rushed at the time to warn people not to try it. But some folks did. Whether they were members of the President’s so-called ‘base’ who trusted Trump implicitly, or just simple folks incapable of independent critical thinking, a few folks actually did try what Trump suggested – and ended up in hospital with serious injuries as a result their efforts.

But now there’s a new iteration of the bleach fiasco that has authorities from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on down concerned. It seems that people are using bleach to wash foods before cooking them.

Why bleach?

Turns out it wasn’t just bleach people were using to clean foods and even themselves. A recent survey by the CDC, “Knowledge gaps were identified in several areas, including safe preparation of cleaning and disinfectant solutions, use of recommended personal protective equipment when using cleaners and disinfectants, and safe storage of hand sanitizers, cleaners, and disinfectants.”

What were those people thinking?

My first reaction was, “Did they totally disregard the warnings on the product labels?” The answer to that question can only be ‘Yes!”

According to an abstract of the survey findings and conclusions, “Thirty-nine percent of respondents reported engaging in non-recommended high-risk practices with the intent of preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, such as washing food products with bleach, applying household cleaning or disinfectant products to bare skin, and intentionally inhaling or ingesting these products. Respondents who engaged in high-risk practices more frequently reported an adverse health effect that they believed was a result of using cleaners or disinfectants than did those who did not report engaging in these practices.”

One notable result of this ‘non-recommended’ application of cleaners was a spike in calls to poison control hotlines and visits to hospital emergency rooms: “One quarter (25%) of respondents reported at least one adverse health effect during the previous month that they believed had resulted from using cleaners or disinfectants, including nose or sinus irritation (11%); skin irritation (8%); eye irritation (8%); dizziness, lightheadedness, or headache (8%); upset stomach or nausea (6%); or breathing problems (6%). Respondents who reported engaging in at least one high-risk practice more frequently reported an adverse health effect than did those who did not report engaging in such practices (39% versus 16%).”

Sixty percent of respondents reported more frequent home cleaning or disinfection compared with that in preceding months.

The takeaway

The survey report concludes: “Public messaging should continue to emphasize evidence-based, safe practices such as hand hygiene and recommended cleaning and disinfection of high-touch surfaces to prevent transmission of [COVID-19] in household settings. Messaging should also emphasize avoidance of high-risk practices such as unsafe preparation of cleaning and disinfectant solutions, use of bleach on food products, application of household cleaning and disinfectant products to skin, and inhalation or ingestion of cleaners and disinfectants.”

So, as a pubic service, I’m dedicating this post today to doing just that.

My take

I just can’t understand why anybody would ignore prominent label warnings and do something dangerous just because a politician – not a medical or scientific authority – said it was okay. Let this episode be a lesson to us all about the power that cult leaders can exert over their followers. I’m old enough to remember the horrors that followed when members of Rev. Jim Jones’ People’s Temple movement drank cyanide-laced Kool Aid in what he called an act of ‘revolutionary suicide’, because he said to, rather than be assailed by outsiders who had come to their settlement in Guyana to investigate.

That might have amplified the the eye-widening shock I felt when I watched and heard Trump make his insane suggestions about bleach and other household cleaners during that news conference. Together with his previous admonition to his followers not to believe anything if it didn’t come from him: “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” Trump said. “Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.”

Trump’s totally uninformed comments about bleach et al created a recipe for potential disaster. I guess we should all be glad the situation didn’t get totally out of hand, adding hundreds or thousands more deaths to the COVID-19-related total.

~ Maggie J.