When considering grilling safety we tend to focus on fire safety and safe food handling to avoid food poisoning. It may never cross your mind that the wire brush you use to clean your grill could send you to the hospital with no idea why you are in pain. Wire brushes can leave bristles on your grill which can then stick to your food and be ingested. Once ingested the bristles can cause serious injuries and sometimes have to be surgically removed.
The Problem with Wire Grill Brushes
Wire grill brushes are commonly used to clean both gas and charcoal grills. At this point no particular brand of grill brush has been linked to injuries. Grill brushes can leave bristles behind, stuck to the grill, and then the bristles can be picked up by the food cooked on the grill, usually meat.
The bristles are small and very sharp. They typically go unnoticed then ingested, but because they are so sharp, they can lodge in the throat or esophagus, work their way into the neck, cause bowel perforations, or damage other parts of the gastrointestinal tract.
Pain may be noticeable immediately upon swallowing the bristle, or may not be noticeable until later. Since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a warning about the problem in 2012 there has been increased awareness among emergency room doctors. However, doctors do not know to look for grill bristles when patients present with neck or abdominal pain unless they are told that the patient ate grilled food shortly before the pain started, and even then, many doctors are still unaware of the grill bristle problem.
Prevention is Simple
To be completely on the safe side you could choose an alternate method of cleaning your grill, but a visual inspection and wiping down the grill after brushing should be sufficient. If you brush is old or showing signs of wear, you might want to spring for a new one.
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