3 On Your Side: Wire BBQ Grill Brush Bristles May Pose Injury Risk
By Jim Donovan
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Plan on grilling out this holiday weekend? One man's favorite burger sent him to a hospital. Now, he shares a warning before you fire up your barbecue. 3 On Your Side Consumer Reporter Jim Donovan explains.
When you put meat on a grill you're usually concerned about cooking it all the way through to kill food-borne bacteria. But it wasn't food poisoning that sent Thomas Hatcher to the hospital, it was 14 millimeters of wire. He says, "I was about halfway through it when I felt something really sharp an intense pain in the back of my throat."
His wife's homemade jalapeno and onion burger was accidentally spiked with a bristle from the grill cleaner. He says, "It was dragging on the back of my mouth and she got me the tweezers and we were trying to grab it with tweezers. But when I would stick my tongue out, it would go into my tongue."
A surgeon had to pull the wire out of his tongue. Hatcher believes the wire was part of a triangle grill brush that his wife used to clean their grill before cooking. She wiped it down, but one bristle still got in the burger.
So, Hatcher is warning everyone to be on the lookout for these tiny hazards. He says, "they need to be very careful and I would suggest that they not use any kind of metal brush anymore."
So what options exist other than brushes with wire bristles? The experts at the Good Housekeeping Institute recommend using coil brushes or even using crumpled aluminum foil to scrub grill grates clean.