I think people will be ok with their standard usb sticks but you could reformat them before use just to be on the safe side.
reformatting only affects the solid state memory part of the stick.. not the chip that stores the firmware.
basically think of it like reformatting a hard drive trying to remove a virus stored in your BIOS chip. and im pretty sure any hacker clever enough to reporgram the firmware, can also add a few lines of code to ignore firmware updates of the memory stick so that you cant just reformat the firmware.
as the article suggests, the hacker tool can just lie to you and pretend its been updated, keeping the hacker code, but changing only the ID of the firmware version to whatever update you try to give it.
plus its old news. authorities have been using it as far back as 2008
http://seattletimes.com/html/microsoft/2004379751_msftlaw29.html