In addition to clean and sufficient protective clothing, careful and regular hand washing is the most important prerequisite for hygienic handling of foods.
Microbes are naturally present on a person’s hands. Some of them are harmless, but some are bacteria that cause food poisoning. Staphylococcus aureus is a common bacterium on human skin and in wounds, the pharynx, the nose and the hands. About one half of people carry the bacterium. The S. aureus types in some people produce enterotoxins, which cause food poisoning. The bacterium is transferred to food through the hands of the food industry worker. Faecal bacteria, such as E. coli, may also end up in foods as a result of poor personal hygiene. Microbes can also be transferred through hands from dirty surfaces. Careful hand hygiene is therefore extremely important in food industry work.
A wound should be covered appropriately, for example, with a plaster. If the wound is in the hand, a protective glove should also be worn. The use of protective gloves prevents the bacteria from spreading from the wound in the hand to the unpacked food.
Good hand hygiene includes the following:
- Always wash your hands carefully before starting to work and, if necessary, during work and between the work stages, such as after handling raw materials, foodstuffs covered in soil, dirty foodstuffs or foods that have gone off.
- Always wash your hands when you use the toilet, after smoking or after coughing, sneezing or blowing your nose.
- Hand washing technique
- Remove any rings, jewellery and watches from your hands. There are huge amounts of dirt and microbes under rings, for example!
- Wet your hands with warm water.
- Apply hand wash liquid to your hands. Soap bars are not hygienic enough.
- Wash both hands carefully. Also wash your thumbs, the back of your hands, between the fingers, the tips of your fingers and under the fingernails. Remember that bacteria thrive under the fingernails! Rinse your hands well under warm running water.
- Pat your hands dry with a disposable towel.
- If the tap does not turn off automatically, turn it off with a towel. Avoid touching the tap with clean hands.
- In work where the hands are in direct contact with foods, fingernails should be short and the cuticles intact. Clean, short nails and healthy cuticles spread fewer microbes than long and dirty nails, under which pathogenic microbes may be present. If you use medicines or cosmetic products for skin or nail care, it is recommended that you protect your hands with disposable protective gloves.
- Any wounds in the hands should be covered carefully with a clean water-tight plaster specifically made for food industry work and with a disposable protective glove.
- When you are handling non-prepacked foods or ready-to-eat foods, do not carry out other tasks at the same time, such as handle money or raw foods, wash the dishes or clean surfaces or customer premises.
- Bacteria cannot be completely removed from hands by washing or disinfecting them. For this reason, any food consumed as such should be touched as little as possible without disposable protective gloves if barehanded, and only clean utensils should be used.
- When you use disposable protective gloves, change them often and wash your hands when changing them. Protective gloves are used to protect the handled food, not only the hands. The gloves should be kept clean in the same way as hands. If you touch a dirty area with the gloves, change the gloves for new ones.
- Looking after the skin of the hands is important. Always use a moisturising hand cream after the end of your shift.
It is recommended that the level of hand hygiene be monitored by sampling. Samples can be collected, for example, by using commercial culture media or blood-containing contact plates that can be ordered from local food laboratories. If the collection of hand hygiene samples is included in the sampling programme of the food premises, sampling from new employees is recommended at the beginning of their employment to ensure that they adopt the instructions for hand washing. Samples from other employees are collected as spot-checks to ensure hygienic working practices, if necessary. In suspected cases of food poisoning, collecting hand hygiene samples may be part of the health authorities’ routines to investigate the cause of the food poisoning.