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.
In: 1190
They can and they can’t. Some stuff dies when it has no food and water (time can kill). Some stuff makes protected little shells (encysts) and waits, other stuff makes seeds or spores designed to last for very long times.
Lots of such life won’t immediately become hazardous though. Not sure breast milk is something that will be kept long enough to be affected by new invasive bacteria or whatever. A lot of stuff that will be on scissors left in a cupboard will also be everywhere in the household. We are exposed to potentially bad things all the time, we breath them in, let them in when we get cut. Most of the time, the body can deal with the random invader. It is massive invasion that creates problems, or worse, the waste products made by a massive invasion.
Point being, no matter how careful you are, you cannot prevent the invasion. You can only reduce the risk. I don’t think disease transfer from scissors in a cupboard for many months is going to be a big risk source, at least if you rinse them off to get rid of any loose stuff. Not cleaning with steam or alcohol isn’t going to be a major problem, not going to change a one in a million risk into 1 in 10; more like 1 in 999,000 instead of a million.
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