Gloved hands may not be any more sanitary than bare ones

There’s something reassuring about watching restaurant workers handle our food with gleaming gloves, but the appearance of extra cleanliness may be no more than that – appearance. That’s what a team of Oklahoma scientists suggests after studying the flora and fauna on hundreds of tortillas purchased at fast food eateries in Oklahoma and Kansas.

The tortilla testing team, led by Robert Lynch, an occupational and environmental health professor at the University of Oklahoma, was addressing a meaty debate among food-safety scientists – whether donning gloves actually lowers the chance that germs end up in food and thus the chance that customers will come down with food poisoning.

The case for gloves: They keep food away from bare hands, which are constantly touching items such as money, raw food, door handles and faucets – places illness-causing microbes can end up.

The case against gloves: They’re only squeaky clean if they’re new, and they won’t help matters if they foster a culture of complacency and backsliding on hand washing.

In the study, published in the January issue of the Journal of Food Protection, Lynch and co-workers chose tortillas as a test case and purchased 371 of them, one at a time, at 140 restaurants from four fast-food chains in Wichita, Kan.; Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Okla.

Roughly half the samples were collected from gloved workers, the others the ungloved.

The scientists sealed the tortillas in sterile containers, stuffed them in a cooler and transported them to a microbiology lab.

There, a small piece of each tortilla was blended in sterile fluid and cultured in nutrients to see what grew – and, specifically, if microbes that flourish inside us would show up.

The reassuring news: Very few of the samples spawned cultures of the microbes being tested, which included Escherichia coli (some forms of which can make us sick) and Staphylococcus aureus (a germ that’s common around the nose, mouth and rectum and that can cause skin infections).

The disconcerting news: There was no statistical difference between glove-handled tortillas and ones that were touched by human flesh. Tortillas handled with gloves gave rise to microbe growth 9.6 percent of the time; those touched with hands, 4.4 percent of the time. But the sample size was not large enough to establish that the rates were truly different.