Sanitary quality of meat chopping board surfaces: A bibliographical study

This bibliographic study on chopping board hygiene is based on 12 scientific publications indicating that little work has been done on this subject. Furthermore, some studies concern household chopping boards and others butchers' chopping blocks. Experimental factors were very different from one study to another and this could explain the different survival rates of bacteria after inoculation onto wooden surfaces. It seems that desiccation leads to loss of culturability of laboratory-grown micro-organisms, but the presence of organic matter may prefect bacteria from desiccation. Natural microflora had higher survival rates than laboratory-grown bacteria. The bacteria sampling method is also of great importance: destructive methods like scraping gave the best bacteria recovery rates because bacteria can penetrate into the wood to a depth that depends on the orientation of the wood fibres. Also discussed is the lack of arguments to prove that plastics are more hygienic than wood for meat cutting boards. Only one field study compared wood and plastic as materials for meat cutting blocks. The only situation where plastic appeared less contaminated than wood (when sampling had been done by contact agar) was just after a drastic cleaning and disinfecting. But we do not know how long this difference was maintained during the working period, or whether the wood had been scraped before cleaning and disinfecting. (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited.