Your dish sponge being a bacteria hotbed might have crossed your mind, but did you know just how dirty they are? Let's just say you may be better off using a kitchen brush, the researchers of a new study say.

The team set out to investigate bacterial levels and the survival of Salmonella – a bacterial disease typically found in contaminated food – in used dishwashing sponges and brushes. To this end, they collected kitchen sponges from 20 people in Portugal, and 35 brushes and 14 sponges from people in Norway.

According to an earlier survey of nearly 10 000 people by the same research team, sponges were commonly used for cleaning in kitchens in European countries, while brushes dominated only in Norway and Denmark.

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