food safety and the hygiene misnomer

Abstract

From a food safety perspective, effective standards of hygiene and cleanliness throughout the food chain are understood to be key factors in reducing the incidence of foodborne disease. Therefore, it is difficult to postulate that we could ever be too clean from the point of view of controlling microbiological hazards in foods. Whist interactions within the human biome are highly complex and many pathways remain to be understood, it is important that views that we might be ‘too clean’ are not allowed to overrule application of food hygiene practices either in the food industry or in the home.