The Semmelweis Technique

The most critical and yet neglected Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures (SSOP) that exists in the general food and beverage industry today is the cleansing and sanitizing of workers hands, including their cotton/rubber production gloves and hand held working tools.

This becomes especially significant following visits to lavatories and whenever workers come into contact with unsanitary objects with their hands/gloves. Most food plants have rigid policies and procedures in place that underscores the importance of proper hand, glove and hand held tool hygiene practices.

Specialists from the Center for Disease and Control (CDC) have clearly documented that people are the highest risk vectors when it comes to contamination in the food and beverage industries.

Workers can unconsciously, effortlessly and clandestinely scatter invisible and harmful bacteria to both critical product contact areas and directly to the products themselves.

Potentially high bacteria levels existing under fingernails can run as high as 2 to 3 million germs per fingernail.

Multiple that by ten.

For this reason alone, companies should require hygienically acceptable production gloves for all product handling, product contact surfaces including dry good handlers, (i.e.; packaging materials that come in direct contact with foods).

Bare hand handling of all raw foods through and including ready-to-eat (RTE) products, including all direct product contact and dry packaging materials should be an item of the 20th century.

Concurrently, companies should prohibit their workers from wearing nail polishes and bodily jewelry of any variety that could pose as chemical and/or physical hazards (HACCP) to the products they are consigned and entrusted to handle.

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There was at one time, a universal scientific opinion that germs were fortuitously born. That the washing of ones hands was not deemed important - nor for that matter was body bathing.

A spontaneous generation theory or ‘Aristotelian abiogenesis’ if you prefer, was an antediluvian theory that held that certain lower forms of life, like insects and germs, were reproduced by physicochemical agencies derived from inorganic matter.

This scientific premise went unchallenged up until the middle of the 17th century. An Italian physician named Francesco Redi, (1626 -1697) started to chip away at the fatuous notion of spontaneous generation.

Redi had keenly observed how maggots of flies were generated on putrefying meat that was exposed to air. Most other scientists of that era remained skeptical of Redi’s theory and continued to cling to the fuzzy and comfortable concept of spontaneous generation.

Next a Hungarian born doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis, (1818-1865) whose vocation was an obstetrician, helped to empower Dr. Redi’s earlier premise that spontaneous generation was but only a convenient and non-scientific mirage.?

In Vienna, during the 1840’s where Semmelweis was head obstetrician, 30 percent of women who were waiting to give birth at lying-in wards were contracting a virulent illness known as puerperal fever and dying shortly after giving birth. Semmelweis became curious to the fact that women who were giving birth at their homes were generally not affected with the lethal pyrexia.

Dr. Semmelweis finally disentombed the culprits.

Doctors and midwives were not washing their hands or their medical instruments before or after their physical examinations of patients. Disturbed at what he was seeing and the connections he inevitably had drawn, Semmelweis ordered all of the care workers to wash their hands and medical apparatuses before and after each examination with a simple and yet effective chlorinated lime mixture.

By devising better personal hygienic practices, Semmelweis inadvertently instituted the world’s 1st recorded hand and instrument-disinfected dip based on an antiseptic prophylaxis.

In less than two years, this new personal hygiene medical procedure lowered the maternal mortality rate from 12.00 percent to 1.25 percent.

In 1862, the brilliant French chemist and pioneering microbiologist Louis Pasteur, (1822–1895) who had adroitly invented the process of pasteurization, synopsized after many experiments that germs were indeed introduced into substances from the environment and not from the substances in of themselves.

In 1880 Pasteur published his milestone book, Germ Theory of Disease,?in which he argued that all contagious diseases were caused by microscopic organisms that could augment at the cellular level from one person to another.

Pasteur’s work was instrumental with eventually bringing the bogus?spontaneous combustion theory?to its final resting home - with many other nostrums of long ago.

Today it’s superfluous to even mention that good personal hygiene practices are critical for medical practitioners, including food and beverage handlers. There remains, nevertheless, the important and inherent responsibility of plant management to incessantly train and educate both new and existing employees on the importance of following good personal hygiene practices.

Clear and enlightening food safety training and education concerning spoilage bacteria and potentially deadly pathogens for all food and beverage handlers should be firmly established on the inaugural day of employment and devoutly re-emphasized unfailingly thereafter.

Company’s who fail to properly train and educate their work force with regards to good personal hygiene practices are merely creating ripe recipes with strong geometric chances of propagating potential pathogenic contamination to the unassuming consumer’s expense while concurrently abbreviating the expected shelf life of their commodities.

Dr. Semmelweis was posthumously awarded with?The Semmelweis Technique, which is simply known today as - hand washing.

This medical epiphany of cleaning one’s hands and instruments before and after examining patients would not be practiced in the United States until the mid 1890’s - some 50 years later.

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Currently, Steve Sayer is a workplace safety consultant to OSHA, EPA, GFSI, USDA and FDA, and a technical writer for multiple industries, as well as a part-time maintenance worker for California State Beaches.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are strictly those of the author.

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Semmelweis University - Budapest, Hungary

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Semmelweis had sent copies of his book to leading obstetricians around Europe, and again, with a few notable exceptions, the responses were almost uniformly negative as they had been when he first announced his findings.

He faced fierce opposition from some of the most prominent physicians in Europe, such as Rudolf Virchow and Friedrich Scanzoni von Lichtenfels, who held different views about the causes of childbed fever. The famous pathologist Virchow, for example, thought that the chief cause of childbed fever was inadequate uterine contractions, which caused thrombosis in vessels in the area around the uterus, and that these thrombi were transformed into puerperal fever. He also attributed the causes to atmospheric conditions and to psychological conditions of the mother.

However, Semmelweis’ doctrine slowly gained acceptance, even if many who adopted prophylactic hand disinfection with chlorine refused to admit it. In 1864, for example, Virchow stated in a lecture, “I recognize the merit of the Vienna school and most specifically that of Semmelweis.”

Even Scanzoni, who had relentlessly attacked Semmelweis personally, acknowledged in 1867, when he wrote in the fourth edition of his textbook:

“It is to the untiring research of the last ten years that we are indebted for the fact that puerperal fever is now almost unanimously considered to be an infectious disease…

Furthermore, we cannot and will not leave unmentioned the fact that, by his restless and self-sacrificing efforts in this field, Semmelweis has rendered a great service to lying-in women in our hospitals.”

Semmelweis did not live to see his doctrine triumph, as he died on August 13, 1865, at the age of 47 in an insane asylum. Recently discovered original autopsy documents have sadly revealed that, in all likelihood, Semmelweis was beaten by his attendants when struggling to escape, and died of generalized sepsis caused by his infected injuries.

The underlying cause of the mental disorder that caused him to be admitted has been, and no doubt will continue to be, debated; but as to Semmelweis’ brilliance, originality, dedication to his patients, and legacy, there can never ever be any dispute.