Food hygiene

Food hygiene is primarily the responsibility of companies processing, producing, treating or marketing foods. Clean working spaces and tools, bodily hygiene of all employees and the selection of proper raw materials for the processing of the different products are particularly important.

Hygiene encompasses all measures which prevent the perishing of food, help to avoid the transmission of infectious diseases or curb the contamination of consumers by residues and contaminants. Cleaning, disinfection, and sterilisation serve, for instance, for the reduction of contamination by microorganisms.

Since many foods are an ideal substrate for microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses and parasites they are subject to particularly stringent demands in terms of hygiene.

BfRshort forGerman Federal Institute for Risk Assessment conducts health assessments for different pathogen/food combinations. This is based on the risk assessment of bacteria, viruses and parasites in foods in accordance with the respective international scientific state of knowledge. A focus of BfRshort forGerman Federal Institute for Risk Assessment is on microorganisms which are transmissible from animals via foods to humans, the so-called zoonoses.

The assessment of the health risk is a dynamic process. For that reason BfRshort forGerman Federal Institute for Risk Assessment permanently adjusts its assessments to the most recent scientific findings.