[Updated Research] Sanitizing and Disinfecting Baby Bottles

Welcome back to the Inspector Mama™️ podcast. I'm your host Carla - I'm a Registered Environmental Health Specialist, a business owner, a seeker of knowledge and - MOST importantly - the mother to the most amazing being in the universe.

I'm so excited for season 2 because all of these episodes are filled with research and facts. Also! I have Miss Jordan helping me research and write.

On this episode, we will discuss sanitizing and disinfecting baby bottles!

Be honest here...

Have you ever...

ONE - actually sanitized your baby’s bottles?

Or

TWO - know that this was an option?

Sanitizing and disinfecting the baby’s bottle, pacifiers, and all of that baby gear... It can be overwhelming!

If anything needs to be sanitized and disinfected, you know I’m all over it.

Ok, let’s start with the definitions. Also, keep in mind that I’m coming at this from a food safety point of view.

• Cleaning means to remove germs by using soap and water. Sanitizing and disinfecting are steps that follow cleaning to further kill more germs (like a double check method).

• Sanitizing means “to reduce microorganisms of public health importance to levels considered safe.”

• Disinfecting means “to destroy or irreversibly inactivate specified infectious fungi and bacteria, but not necessarily the spores, on hard surfaces.”

Beyond that, there’s hospital level sterilization. That’s heavy duty stuff and I won’t go into that on this episode.

So, why is sanitizing and disinfecting so important? To keep your baby safe, of course! A study conducted by Jessica Rothstein, Alejandra Llican Mendoza, Lilia Z. Cabrera, Jessica Pachas, Martiza Calderon, Monica J. Pajuelo studied "Household Contamination of Baby Bottles and Opportunities to Improve Bottle Hygiene." Sounds like a cool group of women!

They tested for the presence Escherichia Coli and Staphylococcus aureus - e.coli and staph. The looked at the cleaning and disinfection of baby bottles in peri-urban areas of Peru. Peri-urban is the belt around a city occupied by households and farmers. For example, Commerce Township in Michigan or one of the smaller farm cities or towns outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. Improper cleaning of baby bottles can stunt the growth of children. If they are continuously exposed to pathogens at an early age, the children may have cognitive impairments and a lower SES in the long run. The study found that as formula feeding becomes more popular, enteric infections are also increasing. Babies that nurse from the breast are less likely to have enteric infections. Basically, this is correlated to the proper cleaning and sanitizing of baby bottles.

They experimented in three different phases

Phase 1: They did not educate on improved practices for cleanliness but kept it as is:

• They rinsed the Bottle sample with sterile water for 60 seconds

• Then, they rinsed the hands of the primary caregiver with sterile water for 60 seconds

•This was tested for e.coli and total coliform and also used a control sample of sterile water

Phase 2: educated improved practices

• Informed of bottle-cleaning procedures using nylon-bristle bottle brush

Phase 3: Trial of improved practices

• Boiling of bottle and nipples for several minutes per day and brush bottle with dish detergent for 30 seconds after every use as well as cleaning the bottle using nylon-bristle bottle brush.

The study reports that the bottles in Phase 1 were highly contaminated with fecal bacteria. Even more so than the caregiver’s hands in the first phase too.

Additional comments—

• Plastic bottles harbor higher residue than glass bottles, but low-income families use plastic bottles because they are cheaper in the place that the study took place

• Important to have more than one bottle so there is an increase in thorough cleaning between feeding

• Boiling may be overly time-consuming and costly. Not as effective for low resource and low-income families

*Happen to be the most common bacteria found in baby bottles

Okay - this is how you do this thing!

First, you must clean the baby bottles, nipples, pacifiers, and all of that stuff that your little one might mouth. You have to get a scrubby pad, those little bottle and nipple brushes, some soap, and some warm water. You have to scrub that stuff clean. If you don’t scrub the bottles and all of the parts clean, then you just have cleaner dirt.

Now that you have scrubbed all of that stuff off, visually inspect your items. Make sure that there isn’t a fermented piece of something stuck to any of those tiny pieces. If there are, you have to wash it again. I’m going to trust that you are as neurotic as I am about what goes around my baby, and I know you will do this part correctly.

Then, you can put them in your dishwasher. You may need to put the bottles on the top rack and you will need one of those baby bottle accessory cages. You need to get a baby lock for the dishwasher too. Once your baby starts crawling, reaching and pulling is right around the corner. You don’t want them to get hurt by messing with the dishwasher.

Check your settings, there is usually a hot water wash setting and sanitize setting. Select those settings. If you have a dishwasher with a sanitize setting, you don’t need to do anything else as far as sanitizing.

Here’s the tricky part... before those baby bottles and the pieces are taken out of the dishwasher, you have to wash your hands. Otherwise, you are putting germs right back on the bottles. A long time ago, when I was a maternal and child health educator, I was teaching a little one how to wash hands. We said that there was peanut butter on the handles of the handwash sink. If the little one touched the handles of the sink without a paper towel, there would be peanut butter all over their hands again! That has always stuck with me. Same thing applies to grown ups though.

If your dishwasher does not have a sanitize setting or if you washed the bottles by hand, you will need to do this next part:

Put a large pot of water on the stove and let it boil.

Remember your other safety stuff here - stove guard, eyes on baby, keep the baby away from the stove and boiling hot water.

Once that water starts boiling, place the bottles and accessories into the boiling water. Let the items boil for 5 minutes. When it’s done, use tongs to remove the bottles

There is a way to sanitize using bleach. However, I am on Team Less Chemicals, so I just used the boiling water method. If you do want to know how to use bleach, just send me a message by going to InspectorMama.com.

Make sure that the work surfaces that your bottles are drying on, like the dish rack or the cupboard. If you store your clean bottles on a dirty dish rack, you now have dirty bottles.

Bottles should be cleaned after every time you feed the baby, regardless of health or age. Bottles should be sanitized every day if baby is less than 3 months old or has immune system problems. Older and healthier babies do not need to have their bottles sanitized daily, however.

Works Cited

"Sanitizers and Disinfectants: The Chemicals of Prevention." Food Safety Magazine, Aug.-Sept. 2011, https://www.foodsafetymagazine.com/magazine-archive1/augustseptember-2011/sanitizers-and-disinfectants-the-chemicals-of-prevention/.

"CDC Guidelines on Cleaning and Sanitizing Baby Bottles." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/hygiene/healthychildcare/infantfeeding/cleansanitize.html.

"FDA Food Code." U.S. Food & Drug Administration, https://www.fda.gov/food/GuidanceRegulation/retailfoodprotection/foodcode/default.htm.

"How to Sterilize and Warm Baby Bottles Safely." HealthyChildren.org, American Academy of Pediatrics, https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/formula-feeding/Pages/How-to-Sterilize-and-Warm-Baby-Bottles-Safely.aspx.

Rothstein, Jessica, et al. "Household Contamination of Baby Bottles and Opportunities to Improve Bottle Hygiene." National Center for Biotechnology Information, Apr. 2019, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6447096/.