Food safety and hygiene: A review

Abstract

Food hygiene are the conditions and measures necessary to certify the safety of food from production to consumption. Food can become contaminated at any point during slaughtering or harvesting, processing, storage, distribution, transportation and preparation. WHO (1984) has defined food hygiene as all conditions and measures that are required during production, processing, storage, distribution and preparation of food to ensure that it is safe, wholesome and fit for human consumption. Lack of requisite food hygiene can lead to foodborne diseases and death of the consumer. Foodborne illness has been associated with improper storage or reheating (50%), food stored inappropriately (45%) and cross-contamination (39%). The increased numbers of people eating out have caused the emergence of food borne illness due to unhygienic preparation and lack of knowledge of personal hygiene. These contributory factors are due to a lack of food hygiene awareness or implementation. Hazard analysis and critical control points, or HACCP is a systematic preventive approach to food safety from biological, chemical, and physical hazards in production processes that can cause the finished product to be unsafe and designs measures to reduce these risks to a safe level. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) require mandatory HACCP programs for juice and meat as an effective approach to food safety and protecting public health. Food hygiene training is therefore crucial in food safety and is an essential part of the hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) concept. Food hygiene and safety usually refer to contamination with ‘microorganisms’ or ‘microbes’. All over the world people are seriously affected every day by diseases that are caused by consuming unhygienic and unsafe food. Good hygienic practices (GHP) to prevent and control foodborne diseases. Foodborne diseases result from eating foods that contain infectious or toxic substances. The term ‘food hygiene’ refers particularly to the practices that prevent microbial contamination of food at all points along the chain from farm to table. Food safety is a closely related but broader concept that means food is free from all possible contaminants and hazards. In practice both terms may be used interchangeably. HACCP implementation in a food business requires the recognition of hazards and their control. Therefore, a major challenge in the food industry is to motivate food handlers to apply what they have learnt regarding food hygiene.