Why can’t you just thoroughly clean baby bottles in the same manner as the guidelines for washing and cleaning against COVID, and instead you’re advised to sterilise them in a certain way?
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The easiest answer is that COVID is a virus and mostly we’re worried about bacteria infections from baby bottles. Also, most people can rely on their body to fight some infections, but infants don’t have a very strong system to fight things off yet and are especially vulnerable.
Some of the same methods are going to clean both ok. But certain bacteria, for example botulism and cronobactor, are really dangerous to babies. With COVID, scrub washing your dishes is probably going to wash off, damage, and overall decrease the amount of virus to a reasonably safe level for most people. Scrub washing will not have the same effect for cronobactor against a baby’s immature immune system. You need to follow specific procedures such as a high enough heat to kill basically all the bacteria for it to be safe.
It’s mostly because babies can’t be vaccinated. So you have to rely on things other than the vaccine to prevent a baby from becoming infected. This would mean being more stringent with things like cleaning their drink bottles.
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