Change.org - Dangerous grill brushes

Metal bristles from grill brushes have injured or killed hundreds of people. Worse, the bristles have the potential to get into your food. Stories of people with metal bristles lodged in their stomach or esophagus have gone viral. With summer grilling season approaching, pressure is building to ban metal grill brushes. A firefighter launched this petition urging the FDA to ban metal grill brushes, and hopes they’ll act before another injury or death. Ban Metal Bristles in Grill Brushes 434 have signed Grill Rescue’s petition. Let’s get to 500!

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Thousands of people every year suffer from a grill related injury. To many people’s surprise, a large number of these injuries are from grill brushes.  People are sent to the emergency room in severe pain from swallowing metal bristles and require emergency surgery. How does this happen? When you clean your grill, you believe you are doing something safe for you and your family. Cleaning your grill is an important part of keeping your family healthy and providing them with good food. However, you may not realize that the very brush you’re using to clean your grill is actually putting you and your family at risk of serious injury.  Typically, your grill bush will be made of plastic and metal bristles. When left outside in the heat or cold, the plastic from your grill brush expands and contracts. The bristles that are set in this plastic become loose over time. When you clean your grill, you must use a bit of force to get the gunk off the grill grates, but what happens is you leave bristles behind on those grill grates. Next time you fire up your grill and toss some burgers or steak on the grill grates, the bristles can get stuck in the meat you’re grilling. What happens next happens far too often. You feed the grilled food to yourself or your family. They then ingest the metal bristle along with the food and end up in excruciating pain. It’s not long after they will be in the operating room to have this bristle surgically removed. Unfortunately, a lot of times these bristles are so small they do not show up on an x-ray and you can have a very long road ahead of you trying to determine the cause of your pain leading to a dangerous outcome including death.  I personally have heard so many stories from people this has happened too. From as minor as the bristle just getting stuck in their gums, to children and adults surgically removing a metal bristle from stomachs, esophaguses, and even the wall of a firefighter heart. If you are unaware of this serious issue, I encourage you to do the Google Search "Grill Brush Injury" to see just how serious this really is.

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