Brushing up on Hygiene: Are Nail Brushes the Unsung Hero of Clean Hands?
Last month, I focused the discussion within the blogs on handwashing. One aspect of handwashing that I did not cover was the use of nail brushes, and this is a question I am often asked while doing food safety training programs. The nail brush is an often-overlooked tool that can play a crucial role in ensuring hand hygiene. But it must be used correctly to be effective, otherwise it can have the opposite effect.
If you’ve followed our blogs at all or if you have ever worked in a foodservice operation, you know the importance of an effective hand hygiene program. Our hands are the primary tools in food preparation and handling. They encounter various surfaces and substances throughout the day, potentially harboring bacteria and pathogens. In a foodservice environment, nail care is essential to preventing foodborne illness. The areas under the fingernails are particularly prone to trapping dirt and microorganisms.
Nail brushes are simple devices and can be purchased on Amazon for as little as $5.00. They are designed to clean the areas under the fingernails and around the cuticles, where regular handwashing is generally not as effective. These brushes have stiff bristles that can dislodge trapped dirt and bacteria, ensuring a more thorough cleaning process. By incorporating the use of nail brushes into the handwashing routine, foodservice workers can significantly reduce the risk of contamination.
While a nail brush seems like an obvious tool to include in our handwashing arsenal, some states have been removing them from their food code, and the 2022 FDA Model Food Code has no requirement that a handwashing station include a nail brush (outside of the inclusion of a nail brush as one of the two effective control measures if an operation allows barehand contact with ready-to-eat foods). Why would this be? Even the annex three of the food code espouses the benefits of a nail brush, stating “the area under the fingernails, known as the “subungual space”, has by far the largest concentration of microbes on the hand and this is also the most difficult area of the hand to decontaminate. Fingernail brushes…have been found to be effective tools in decontaminating this area of the hand. Proper use of single-use fingernail brushes, or designated individual fingernail brushes for each employee, during the handwashing procedure can achieve up to a 5-log reduction in microorganisms on the hands.”
Nail brushes may seem like a small detail in the grand scheme of your food safety program, but their impact on hygiene and food safety can be substantial – either negatively or positively.
The reason they are not required in the food code and that many states are now removing the requirement is that nail brushes themselves must be kept clean to be effective. Think about the environment at the handwashing station, damp, sometimes wet, and a nailbrush can be dirty – which can cause bacteria to survive, and perhaps grow and thrive. If you read the portion above from annex three of the food code, it does note that a SINGLE-USE or DESIGNATED INDIVIDUAL fingernail brush can achieve a 5-log reduction. This is because of the difficulty operators have with keeping a reusable fingernail brush clean and sanitary. I believe it was EcoLab used to sell nail brushes with a sanitizer dish, but I cannot even find that on their website any longer, so I am assuming contamination became an issue and they stopped carrying them (or no one ordered them, so they discontinued them). They do still carry a nail brush, but without the sanitizing dish.
So, should you have a nail brush in your foodservice? I would encourage you to talk to your inspector first. While I have not heard this directly from inspectors, I have been told by many foodservice operators across the country that their local health department or inspector asked them not to have a nail brush on-site. If you are allowed to have a nail brush, I would encourage you to purchase single-use brushes (which are not cheap, but even Temu has a pack of 100 nail brushes for $0.079 each) or provide one for each employee and ask them to maintain it properly. If you and your inspector determine that a shared nail brush is acceptable for your organization (which I would tend to advise against more and more with the research I have read on these), be sure that you have a method to clean and sanitize it effectively after each use and store it properly.
Nail brushes may seem like a small detail in the grand scheme of your food safety program, but their impact on hygiene and food safety can be substantial – either negatively or positively. Give it some consideration before implementing the use of nail brushes in your operation and make sure it is a positive addition to your plan and not a negative one. Risk Nothing.
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Foodborne Illness Myths & Facts
“It must have been something I ate.” That’s the typical statement when a person develops some relatively minor symptoms from food. Maybe not severe enough to go to the doctor so you choose to tough it out without medical care. Sudden onset of flu-like symptoms such as onset of stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting and fever could possibly mean you are the victim of a foodborne illness. The illness is sometimes referred to as “food poisoning”, but it’s often misdiagnosed.
Don’t Compromise: Clean and Sanitize
The subject is cleaning and sanitizing. Chefs, food service directors, managers and staff try to practice safe food-handling at every turn in the kitchen. Don’t let that effort go down the drain by slacking off on the many aspects of sanitation. That includes dish and ware-washing techniques (pots, pans, equipment), and cleaning all the areas that give us that “neat as a pin” appearance in your customers eyes. Customers seldom fail to bring that soiled silverware or glass with lipstick on it to the attention of the manager or wait staff. Improperly cleaning and sanitizing of food contact equipment does allow transmission of pathogenic microorganisms to food and ultimately our customer.
The Route to Safer Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
Although fruits and vegetables are one of the healthiest foods sources in our diet, we continue to have foodborne disease outbreaks of significance from produce, sometimes affecting large groups of people in multiple states because of their wide distribution. The CDC estimates that fresh produce now causes a huge number of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States. Produce needs our continued food safety efforts at the restaurant level as well as at the stages in agricultural production. Occasionally, fresh fruits and vegetables can become contaminated with harmful bacteria or viruses, such as Salmonella, E. coli 0157:H7, Norovirus, and Hepatitis A. This contamination can occur at any point from the field to our table. If eaten, contaminated fruits and vegetables can cause foodborne illness.
Be Cool, Chill Out, Refrigerate Promptly!
The Cold Chain -- Keeping perishable foods at proper cold holding temperatures (between 28°F and 41°F maximum or 0°F for frozen food) from your food producers / manufacturers to your customers has to be one of our strongest links to safe food and high quality. Sometimes that is referred to in the food industry as “maintaining the COLD CHAIN”. Any slip ups in the cold chain, and we have a weak link. Most all of our state food regulations require 41°F as a cold maximum, but colder is a “best practice” policy to maintain.
