Do we swab hands or gloves when gloves are worn as standard?
Hi all,
We r plan to have hand swab on our worker. Wondering should the test conducted on worker bare hand or hand wear with gloves..Assuming hand glove must wear while production carry on..
While your routine tests would be the swab of the food contact surface, which is the gloves, it is advisable that in order to review personnel hygiene you also build in a system of obtaining food handler bare hand swabs.
We used to swab operators gloves for yeast and mold when a mold problem came up in yogurt manufacturing.
We do both. Gloves because they come into contact with the product, but what if the glove breaks and they touch the food with bare hands by accident. So we swab the hands as well. :smile:
We also swab both as the hands touch the gloves on the outside as the employees puts on the gloves. Over the years we have taken many swabs of both and we have discovered that the outer of the glove is very clean and if is ocntaminated it is closely related to the analysis on the hand. So now we do more swabs on hands than on gloves.
But I guess that it very much depends on the product handled - and frequency for change og washing of gloves.
Hi,
we do both because your are not able to put gloves on with not treated hands. Secondly it is phychological.
Rgds
moskito
Swabbing gloves for Y&M, APC and other indicator organisms is very normal for industries like meat and poultry, and useful data if your willing to go through building a base line to mark pass / fail criteria. in our EMP, monthly, locations per the sampling schedule are swabbed, gloves are considered a zone 2 swab, as they may have food on them that was not intended to be in the food, but still gets in the food.
We also validated our hand washing / glove policy by ATP swabbing 10 employees like this;
- Swabbing the glove 2 hours into shift,
- Swabbing bare hand directly after removal of glove,
- They were sent directly to wash per the policy and swabbed after
- then they sanitized hands we waited 10 seconds for them to dry and swabbed again.
- then ATP swabbed the glove
we saw a dramatic reduction in RLU in each step.
As it stands, regularly washing hands and changing gloves is far cleaner than an employee wearing a glove all day or changing gloves without washing and sanitizing first.