The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a set of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations including those that that will apply to food growers, was signed into law by President Obama in 2011. On January 13, 2013, the FSMA Produce Safety Proposed Rule became available for public comment.
In shifting the focus of regulation from responding to food contamination outbreaks to preventing them at the source, the FSMA Produce Safety Proposed Rule is a critical component of FSMA, the most advanced set of changes in food safety laws since the Great Depression.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in its Estimates of Foodborne Illness in the United States, one in six Americans, or 48 million people, contracts a foodborne illness. Of that number, 128,000 cases require hospitalization and 3,000 victims die.
The FSMA Produce Safety Proposed Rule will help proactively protect the food we consume and better safeguard the health of Americans. This is a dramatic improvement over the way the issue is currently addressed—by seeking the source of the problem once a food poisoning outbreak has occurred. In this scenario, people are already stricken before the source is found and corrective action is taken.
According to the FDA, FSMA will, in part, create “science-based minimum standards for the safe growing, harvesting, packing, and holding of produce…grown for human consumption.”1
Hand Hygiene Issues Should Still be Resolved
The FSMA Produce Safety Rule will focus on five recognized pathways of contamination: water, soil amendments (additives such as raw manure and compost), animals, health and hygiene and equipment/building sanitation.
At GOJO, we feel the hand hygiene pathway is critical for maintaining the safety of the food we eat, but we still have concerns that the hand hygiene recommendations in this Proposed Rule don’t go quite far enough. Consider the following statistics from this FDA survey of farm workers:2
- 91 percent state that they do not wash their hands before work
- 25 percent don’t wash their hands after using the toilet
- 30 percent of those who are provided toilet facilities on the farm stated that they instead went to the bathroom in the field
Soap and water options are limited in the field. If water is even available, it’s often portable, potable cold water that’s trucked to a location and workers often have to walk a good distance to be able to use the station. Many operations use potentially contaminated refillable bulk soap dispensers. In other operations, old-fashioned bar soap is still used! Both of these options are susceptible to bacterial contamination.
It’s for these very reasons, and so many more that we introduced PURELL® Hand Sanitizer. It is a hand hygiene and hand sanitizing solution that is a waterless process, making hand hygiene possible where water is so scarce, restricted or dirty that the basic hygiene issues listed above are difficult, if not impossible. By offering this solution, it not only benefits farm workers, but also will benefit the health of those who come into contact with crops.
At GOJO, we are continually working to understand customer needs and hand hygiene product performance in these unique work environments. That’s why we are proposing that the FDA allow farmers to choose products that are convenient, easy to use and high performing – with or without water. Hand transfer of microorganisms is only prevented if the hygiene product is effective and available.
Find Out More
A tentative final Produce Safety Rule will be available for public comment later this summer. In the meantime, you can learn more about the FSMA Produce Safety Rule and the impact it will have on food safety and your own health and well-being by visiting this FDA web page.
Also if you have any questions or feedback regarding hand hygiene as it relates to food processing and the FSMA Produce Safety Rule, feel free to leave a comment.