How safe your ‘eco-friendly’ shopping bag?
They may be good for the environment,but reusable eco-friendly shopping bags may not be good for your health,scientists claim.
They may be good for the environment,but reusable eco-friendly shopping bags may not be good for your health,scientists claim.
Researchers at the University of Arizona found that the so-called ‘green’ bags harbour potentially deadly bugs which could threaten public health.
Tests on shoppers’ bags showed that half of them contained traces of the lethal toxin E.coli,which killed 26 people in Scotland in 1996 in one of the world’s worst food-poisoning outbreaks,the Daily Mail reported.
“Our findings suggest a serious threat to public health,especially from bacteria such as E.coli,” said Prof Charles Gerba,who led the study.
“Consumers are alarmingly unaware of these risks and the critical need to sanitise their bags weekly.”
The experts,who stopped 84 shoppers to check the state of their bags,also found many bags were contaminated with salmonella,a bug that causes diarrhoea,fever,vomiting,and abdominal cramps.
Expressing fear that unwashed bags could pose a health threat,the experts said reusable bags must be washed regularly at high temperature to kill bugs left by the packaging from raw meat.
The level of bacteria they found was high enough to “cause a wide range of serious health problems and even death”,particularly to children,said the report.
The popularity of reusable eco-friendly bags has soared in Britain as the growth in recycling means fewer consumers use disposable plastic bags.
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