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Food Hygiene, otherwise known as Food Safety can be defined as handling, preparing and storing food or drink in a way that best reduces the risk of consumers becoming sick from the food-borne disease. The principles of food safety aim to prevent food from becoming contaminated and causing food poisoning.
With this in mind, ensuring that food is safe for human consumption is likely the most critical part of the food preparation process. This ranges from what is called farm to fork, meaning from the farms all the way to your plate.
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This means that food hygiene is important at home as well as in the restaurant, retail store or food factory.
There has become an ever-increasing awareness of food safety by the general public and news agencies are reporting on food recalls and outbreaks much more often.
Reviewing the available statistics, The CDC estimates that each year 48 million people get sick from a food-borne illness, 128,000 are hospitalised, and 3,000 die from food poisoning.
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Food hygiene is important for the following reasons:
- If food or drink is not safe to eat, you cannot eat or drink. The easiest example of this is safe drinking water. We would never drink water that did not come from a reputable source. The very same principle applies to food.
- Every day, people worldwide get sick from the food or drink they consume. Bacteria, viruses and parasites found in food can cause food poisoning.
- There is no immediate way of telling if food is contaminated because you cannot see, taste or smell anything different from the norm.
- Food poisoning can lead to gastroenteritis and dehydration or potentially even more serious health problems such as kidney failure and death.
- This risk is especially significant for those in the high-risk category: Small children/ babies, pregnant moms, the elderly and immunocompromised, especially HIV infections and cancer patients.
- Food hygiene and safety prevent germs from multiplying in foods and reaching dangerous levels.
- Ensures daily healthy family living.
- Keeping one healthy and preventing the additional cost of buying medication and medical check-ups. This is especially important is business. Companies worldwide loss Billions of Dollars per year due to staff downtime.
- Hand washing accounts from 33% of all related food poisoning cases. It is therefore important to maintain good personal hygiene practice. This is something we are taught early in our childhood, yet hand washing is still a critical problem in the kitchen
Cross-contamination is a major cause of food poisoning and can transfer bacteria from one food to another (usually raw foods to ready to eat foods).
It is crucial to be aware of how it spreads so you will know how to prevent it. Good food hygiene is therefore essential for food factories to make and sell food that is safe to eat. The first step is for the management and staff to have the knowledge and understand of what food hygiene and food safety is.
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