I took Sam, the almost-two-year-old grocery shopping for the weekend’s meals. We’ve got butternut squash soup, homemade pizzas, roast beef and lots of veggies on the menu. After cruising the aisles and loading the ingredients on the cashier’s checkout counter belt, I passed him my reusable bags (a couple polypropylene and canvas ones). All the packaged goods and fresh produce went into those and then the cashier dude asked whether I wanted my roast beef in a separate, one-use plastic one. I said I did.

But it’s not because I’m a rampant conservative who thinks the liberal environmental agenda is silently killing me with norovirus (aided by CDC) through pushing reusable bags, as seen on Breitbart earlier this week:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently expanded its website to include a norovirus toolkit advising the ways in which one might contract the killer virus. 

Among the public health agency’s prescribed practices to stop the spread of the virus: “Practice proper hand hygiene … Take care in the kitchen … Do not prepare food while infected … Clean and disinfect contaminated surfaces after throwing up or having diarrhea … Wash laundry thoroughly.”

But nowhere in that exhaustive battery of norovirus dodges was a recommendation to avoid reusable grocery bags. Curious, considering that reusable-but-not-recyclable alternative to single-use plastic bags were recently linked to an unsavory outbreak of norovirus that struck a hapless middle school-aged girls’ soccer team.

Uh huh – and after exchanging emails with the insightful and entertaining Bill Keene, one of the folks who investigated that outbreak and coauthor of the paper cited, he confirmed that the type of bag was irrelevant: “This story had nothing to do with disposable bags, reusable bags, or anything similar. It is about how when norovirus-infected people vomit, they shower their surroundings with an invisible fog of viruses—viruses that can later infect people who have contact with those surroundings and their fomites. In this case these were was a reusable bag and its contents—sealed packages of Oreos, Sun Chips, and grapes— but it could just have easily been a disposable plastic bag, a paper bag, a cardboard box, the flush handle on the toilet, the sink, the floor, or the nearby countertops.”

Brietbart goes on to cite the only published microbiological-risks-in-bags study from Williams and colleagues (2011),

Researchers at the University of Arizona sampled 84 reusable bags from shoppers in Los Angeles, the most recent major municipality to ban plastic bags, and two additional bag-outlawed cities. The findings were stunning: just over half were contaminated with some form of harmful bacteria (fact-check alert: half had some sort of coliform which are naturally associated with plant material and are not often thought as major public health risks -ben)  while at least twelve percent contained traces of fecal matter.

The Williams study showed that generic E. coli can be floating around in bags, recoverable in 7 of the 84 bags in the study (8 percent, not 12)  but can it be (or is it likely) to be transferred to any ready-to-eat foods, or somehow to food contact surfaces in the home? Just because the bacteria might be there, doesn’t mean it can contaminate a ready-to-eat food. No one has presented data to support that. In a cross-contamination event there is a dilution effect when it comes to transfer and it needs some sort of matrix to facilitate the transfer.

We keep our reusable bags dry; wash them every couple of weeks and use one-use bags for raw meat.