Newsgroups: rec.woodworking
From: tip@ai.chem.ohiou.edu (Tom Perigrin)
Subject: Re: Cutting Board
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 15:57:05 GMT

In article <51im31$3de@watt.electriciti.com>, ljaques@diversify.com (Larry
Jaques) wrote:

> You've got it backwards, Phil.  Plastics repel germs while the
> porous woods tend to harbor them in VERY large numbers.  The FDA
> recently (last year) issued warnings about cutting chicken on
> wooden boards. They recommended rinsing with BLEACH after cutting
> meats on wooden cutting boards.

I think seombody needs to find a few references here, and post them. 
Unfortunately, I don't have them to hand, so it won't be me.

As I pointed out, there was a report that discredited that "common
knowledge" about wood being worse than plastic.  Wood contains some natural
antibiotics that help reduce the number of germs, while plastic is benign.

Our local health authorities require restaraunts to perform a wipedown with
bleach or other suitable disinfectant on all cutting surfaces.  

And chicken?   You really should treat any surface that comes into contact
with commerical chickens with a blowtorch.   PBS did a story on the
production lines for poultry...   They shove the live chicken into a device
that resembles a washing machine, which batters it to death, and strips
most of the feathers.  The chicken also exhibits the typical "flight or
fight" response - namely it shits.  So the chicken carcass comes out of the
plucker covered with a thin film of feces.  It then goes to the cleaning
line, where the workers quickly open the body cavity and seperate out the
parts.   This operation often opens the lower bowels, thus spreading more
chickenshit everywhere.  There is a rinse at the end of this process, but
all that rinse really accomplishes is to spread the visiable lumps feces
into a thin, even layer over the entire carcass.

Look at the FDA recommendations for handling chicken!  Rubber gloves,
decontamination of touched surfaces, etc...   My wife has worked with
Yrsinia pestis (the black death) in a biohazard lab, and that almost the
same recommendations.