How clean is your kitchen? Not very according to a recent study. Chances are that your bathroom maybe the cleanest room in your house.

Our kitchens are the center of our all home activity, the room we prepare food in, socialize in and eat in. And it maybe the most dangerous room in the house.

The new study found that our kitchen sinks have more germs and bacteria than the sinks in our bathrooms. The study discovered that kitchen cleaning equipment like ordinary wiping cloths and sponges are heavily contaminated with harmful bacteria.

The study conducted by international environmental scientists in 6 different countries found that 90 percent of kitchen cloths, 46 percent of kitchen sinks and 38 percent of bathroom sinks failed the test for cleanliness. They all had a bacteria count of 100 thousand per square centimeter.

The prominent bacteria was e-coli and salmonella which can be carried into the house by food, small children and pets. The bacteria can cause diarrhea or flu like infections and can be especially dangerous to infants, the elderly and pregnant women.

“Bacteria find a happy home in sponges. When you wipe, you take up food and drink and the bacteria can feed on that,” said Charles Gerba, an environmental microbiology professor at the University of Arizona.

The problem is that we do not clean the things that we wipe up with often enough. Regular washings of kitchen linens and disinfecting kitchen sponges would go a long way towards making our kitchens safer.

Dean Cleaver, a professor of food safety at the University of California, suggests sterilizing sponges with a 1 minute, high power blast in the microwave. Cleaver also suggest that we wash our hands frequently and after rinsing in the sink, clean the sink.

John Oxford, who led the study and who is a professor of virology at the Royal London Hospital, suggests that we expend great effort in cleaning our bathrooms but don’t extend that same concern to our kitchens.

We take a lot for granted in our kitchens. We don’t often clean new food that is brought into the house. All fruits and vegetables should be rinsed before being stored and the sink should be cleaned afterward.

We often rinse chicken, meats and fish over the kitchen sink but don’t consider the residue that we may have left behind.

Ironically the study also found that bachelors, and other slobs, had the cleanest kitchens.

They had a tendency to just throw their dirty dishes into the sink and didn’t often wipe their counter tops thereby spreading bacteria.