I have a pair of scissors that’s been in a mostly unopened cabinet for 5+ years. I wanted to cut open a bag of breastmilk with clean scissors but water and soap aren’t readily accessible at the moment.
The cabinet is in a former classroom so presumably the scissors were used by kids. My husband says using the scissors wouldn’t be sanitary. I believe him, but honestly I don’t understand why with time and no food the bacteria wouldn’t just die.
EDIT: I should have used the term sanitary not sterile. My baby is old enough that we don’t sanitize pump and bottle parts daily, just wash and dry after uses.
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The environment they’re in isn’t sterile, so why would they be sterile? The air itself is carrying spores and bits of life around, and they settle periodically on surfaces, which are generally wetted on a microscopic level.
I’ll add that soap and water doesn’t sterilize either, it’s low-level disinfection; if you didn’t put something in an autoclave, it isn’t sterile.
In the absence of nutrients, moisture, and/or suitable temperature, some bacteria can shrink and shrivel up into a dormant state. They don’t die. They’re just waiting for the moment they find some fluid and nutrients. Like breast milk.
The environment isn’t entirely sealed so you’ve got a constant, if slow, flow of germs in and out of that cabinet. Some bacteria have died, some have merely gone into hibernation, but there is always bacteria moving in.
Bacteria can dry up and enter a state called “spores”. They can then remain viable indefinitely, waiting for water and food to appear – like milk. Bacterial spores over 10,000 years old have been revived successfully, and in principle nothing stops them from being revived even after millions of years.
For the same reason plant seeds can persist for thousands of years, then grow again when conditions are right. Sterilization destroys the potential for pathogens to reproduce by actually killing them.
Urushiol Oil from poison ivy takes years to destabilize.
Do yard work in gloves and get a rash, two years later touch those gloves you’ll get a rash again.
Its actually the opposite of your intuition. Even something that starts perfectly sterile will become unsanitary over time if there is a leak from its sealed environment to the outside environment. Dust particles carry living and nonliving contaminants to pretty much every corner of every space that the air can reach.
just FYI soap/water aren’t going to really cut it either – you want bleach or fire.
clean and sanitized are two different states – although for most household use clean is plenty. A thing is clean when you have washed off all of the dirt, dust, and other goop that has attached to a surface. Soap is useful for this because it grabs both oil and water simultaneously, so it’s really good at cleaning things, but it does NOT sanitize. Soap will only wash off about 80-95% (depending on how long/well you wash) of the bacteria, and although it does actively destroy viruses it will only destroy 95-99% of them, which leaves enough behind to cause an infection. This isn’t a problem for an average adult, but for infants you need more caution than that.
To sanitize you need to actively destroy the bacteria/viruses, either chemically (usually via bleach, but there are other options) or via temperature (anything with a visible flame is hot enough) over 5-10 minutes of exposure.
There’s actually quite a bit of microbes that are moved about by air currents. Humidity and dust (which can contain dead cells from skin and so on) are sufficient for some things to live for quite some time.
Some microbes, when water or food resources get low, form inactive spores (imagine seeds, or dehydrated yeast from the supermarket) that become active again when there’s sufficient water or nutrients (like in breast milk).
Hmm, so bacteria are basically like college students waiting for their next meal swipe?
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