Baby Protection for Restaurants and Shopping Carts

Using items in public that other people have inadvertently contaminated is a real source of passing viruses. Children are especially at risk.

I have seen two ideas that are intriguing in this area. One is called a Shopping Cart Cover. The push-bar on shopping carts is supposedly very contaminated. In a typical day, a supermarket cart can be exposed to the drippings from chicken and meat, and even young children still in diapers. Labs found several types of bacteria and fungus that could cause disease, especially in people with fragile immune systems like children. The most serious bacteria found was enteroccocus facaelis – indicating the presence of fecal matter. On other carts bodily fluids like blood, mucus and saliva were found. A cover, like the one in this picture (http://www.babyspree.com/ ), isolates the baby from the shopping cart and can also be used in a restaurant high-chair. In both cases, the baby is protected from the contaminants from previous users. This cover is available from the above website, but is also in most baby stores.

My search for “contaminated shopping carts” on Google found 159,000 hits. A search for “contaminated restaurant high chair” found 10,200 hits. A search for “shopping cart cover” found 1,560,000. These indicate that there are real dangers for infants and lots of places to buy protective covers.

The second idea is a plastic cover which you can stick to the restaurant table in front of your child. This isolates them from whatever is on, or embedded in, the table. The best ones are sticky on the underside so that they don’t move around as your child enjoys their meal. These covers are disposed of at the end of the meal. The one that I found is at http://www.tabletopper.com/tabletopper/Products/?Name=table_topper .

Both ideas are clever ways to help protect your baby from bacteria and viruses that can live for up to 10 hours on shopping carts, restaurant tables and high chairs.