World Antibiotic Awareness Week: How Safe is Your Kitchen?
As Regulatory Affairs Manager my job is to help cutomers make their product more hygienic, this often involves conversations about pathogens (bacteria that cause illness) and how we get ill and what we can do to protect ourselves.
The best thing we can do to protect ourselves is wash our hand, Lisa Ackerley, The Hygiene Doctor, highlights this well by saying "...that in most cases we infect ourselves - pathogens don’t get into our bodies on their own, the most common vector for doing this is our hands."
By not washing our hands before eating, touching our nose, eyes or mouths, we give bacteria the perfect lift to a holiday inside our own bodies, which incidentally has a finely balance bacteria ecosystem of its own.
The human body is home for a large number of bacteria. These bacteria are there primarily to digest food but they also can affect our moods, cravings and overall health, while at the same time providing some protection to pathogens. The gut contains most of the bacteria and via the vagus nerve the bacteria can even have an influence on the human body without having to involve the brain.
When we take antibiotics the effect on the ‘microbiome’ of bacteria in our body can be drastic. Killing healthy gut bacteria resulting in them being excreted in our faeces by the effect of the antibiotic alone.
As a business we are very passionate about giving advice that can prevent people taking antibiotics unnecessarily. With that in mind, Addmaster has contributed to and part-financed a white paper from IFH Home Hygiene in conjunction with the RSPH which is released this week to coincide with World Antibiotic Awareness Week.
This white paper was developed initially to give the right advice to journalists. One day a newspaper will announce ‘bacteria will kill us all‘ and then the day after the same newspaper will announce ‘we are all too clean and we should eat dirt’.
This can all be very confusing for the public - and potentially very dangerous information for our personal hygiene.
What the white paper does do, is clearly highlight the scientific consensus that Targeted Hygiene is the key to us staying healthy and this relates to the actions we take – for example, washing our hands properly - or avoiding picking up pathogens where dangerous touch points exist.
I am always fascinated by how complacent we feel about the level of protection we have in our own homes, thinking the dangers are all outside, when in fact our own kitchens can be source of more pathogens then anywhere else we come into contact with.
Think about your own domestic kitchen. Would you eat in a restaurant that used the same surfaces for cooked and uncooked food and stored them together? Or one that allowed pets to freely roam around on and off surfaces and onto those same surfaces place shopping bags, handbags, school bags, etc?
No you wouldn’t. Restaurants don’t make these mistakes because we would very soon stop eating at the ones that were making us ill….so why do we think it’s OK to do this in our own homes?
A famous fast food chain we are working with that always impresses me with its attitude to customer safety and hygiene, gets so frustrated that more people wash their hands in their facilities, after eating their food than before they start their meal.
In this World Antibiotic Awareness Week I would therefore advise anyone interested in learning about the unbiased scientific facts about targeted hygiene and what you can do to reduce the likelihood of becoming ill and having to take unnecessary antibiotics, to read the press brief link. The full paper can be downloaded from this link if you are scientifically minded.
If you are also interested in how the bodies microbiome works I can also recommend the following books:
The Clever Guts Diet - Michael Mosley
← Back to blog