How do dishwashers remove E Coli and other organics from our dishes. Are they really safe.

Question

I have just found out there’s ecoli in my well water at the place we just moved to and am hearing I need 165 to kill ecoli but my dishwasher says it only heats to 155 but claims this meets the standard for safe drinking water.

Confused about whether or not it’s safe to use the dishes coming out of my dishwasher till the well manager can come up with a method to treat the water or something.

I can’t even imagine how I would boil the water I use to run through the dishwasher or clean my dishes with boiling water by hand sounds super fun.

Is it safe to use the dishwasher?

In: 803

Answer 1

The way dishwashers clean is twofold. Both in the way it cleans food off of your plate and how it kills bacteria and viruses.

Soap is obviously a candidate. It does a great job getting the food off, but it does help with the sanitizing. Basically the soap likes to react with thing, and when it does it breaks down its structure. That’s how it cleans off food, but soap also likes to interact with the structure of bacteria and viruses. It basically rips apart their walls and let’s there insides spill out, killing it. This is why it’s safe to wash your hands or shower with the infected water, the soap is doing the killing.

The other cleaning action is heat. The heat speeds up this reaction process, but it also specifically helps the sanitization because the proteins that make up the bacteria and viruses only function properly at certain temperatures. If it gets too hot, they bend or break apart or link together (depending on the temperature or protein) and this kills the bacteria/virus. It’s the same logic behind your body giving you a fever, or cooking. The heat kills off anything bad. You can see this happen in real time when you cook eggs, the eggs going from liquid to solid is the proteins denaturing and getting tangled together to form a solid. Most dishwashers have a sanitization setting where it gets really hot and basically steams the dishes. This is the setting you would use for baby bottles and the like. This is also what industrial dishwashers in restaurants do because it’s much faster.