According to a study published in the June 2002 issue of the Journal of Food Protection (Volume 65), rubber gloves proved significantly more effective than knit gloves in preventing tranfer of the pathogen Escherichia coli (E. coli) during food preparation and handling. In the eight-tiered, International Association for Food Protection study, five volunteers handled five pieces of meat with bare hands or while wearing dry or wet knitted gloves or rubber gloves after hands had been inoculated with E. coli or after handling a piece of meat inoculated with E. coli. On each occasion, after all meat was handled, meat pieces, gloves and hands were sampled to recover evidence of the pathogen.
When hands were inoculated, E. coli was recovered from all meat handled with bare hands, in lesser numbers from some pieces handled with knitted gloves, and from only one piece handled with rubber gloves. When pieces of inoculated meat were handled, the numbers of E. coli bacteria transferred to uninoculated meat from bare hands or rubber gloves decreased substantially with each successive piece of uninoculated meat, but decreases were small with knitted gloves, the researchers reported.
The findings indicate that, compared with bare hands, the use of knitted gloves reduces the transfer of bacteria from hands to meat but increases the transfer of bacteria between meat pieces. Moreover, the use of rubber gloves largely prevents the former and greatly reduces the latter type of bacterial transfer. The International Association for Food Protection is a non-profit association of food safety professionals.
