Food Safety Tips: Washing your hands

How often did your parents ask you to wash your hands before eating? It’s one of the oldest and best ways to prevent a foodborne illness, but one that we tend to take for granted – and also forget. Giving your hands a good scrub is an important measure to prevent spreading pathogens to food.

Always wash your hands before handling food. It’s equally vital to wash them after touching raw meat and poultry, going to the toilet, blowing your nose or sneezing into your hand while preparing food, changing nappies, handling pets and doing gardening.

To make sure your hands are really clean, you should wash them thoroughly using soap and warm water and then dry them on a clean, dry towel or paper towel. Making sure hands are dry is critical. Recent research shows washed hands that have not been dried can be more of a risk for transferring pathogens to food than hands not washed at all. If you want to be particularly careful, especially after handling raw meat for example, use a paper towel to turn off the tap. This is because you could have transferred bacteria to the tap when you turned it on with your unwashed hands.