It makes sense that germs would thrive on wood. You never can get it really clean. It did make sense. Soon I too saw articles exhorting cooks to avoid porous, organic, and germ-encouraging wood in favor of inert sterilizable plastic. Sadly I replaced my cherished wooden things with inorganic, impervious plastic, stuff so hostile to bacteria that nothing seems to cause it to decay.
Science giveth bad news, but sometimes it taketh away again.
Microbiologists Dean Cliver and Nese Ak were looking for ways to clean wood safely after it had been in contact with food contaminated by bacteria. The first step was to be sure their study boards had appropriately unpleasant microorganisms to be cleaned off. They cultured some known disease-causing bacteria, such as Salmonella, Listeria, and Escherichia coli, and anointed wooden boards with about 10,000 cells of cultured bacteria. That's about 10 times the number of organisms that typically wash off a contaminated chicken carcass. Within three minutes, 99.9 percent of the bacteria were unrecoverable and presumed dead.