New dishware sanitizers ‘more effective at killing harmful bacteria’

WASHINGTON - Ohio State University researchers tested two new dishware sanitizers, and found them to be more effective at removing bacteria from restaurant dishes than traditional sanitizers.

Melvin Pascall, co-author of the study, said that the two new sanitizers reflect the industry’s recent efforts to develop more effective germ killers that are also environmentally friendly.

The two sanitizers - one carrying the name brand PROSAN and the other called neutral electrolyzed oxidizing water - not only proved more effective, but they also contained fewer toxic chemicals.

“Longer lasting sanitizers could be more cost effective for restaurants because they would not have to use nearly as much sanitizing solution as they currently do,” said Pascall.

He and his colleagues decided to compare the effectiveness of four different sanitizers by contaminating samples of milk and cream cheese with the highly infectious bacteria E. coli, and Listeria innocua.

They chose four sanitizers: PROSAN, a neutral electrolyzed oxidizing water, an ammonia compound, and sodium hypochlorite.

The research team washed the dishes manually and by machine. Results indicated that the dishes washed by machine have consistently smaller amounts of the harmful bacteria on them, regardless of the sanitizers used.

Pascall and colleagues tested multiple dirty loads with the same batch of sanitizer to see how many loads they could wash and still have a 5-log reduction of bacteria.

“For both types of bacteria, the electrolyzed water and PROSAN could wash more loads clean than the ammonia compound and the sodium hypochlorite.

Between the electrolyzed water and the PROSAN, they were equally as effective except for cleaning ceramic plates, where the electrolyzed water was slightly more effective,” said Pascall.

The findings were reported in the journal Food Control. (ANI)