Salmonella transfer potential during hand harvesting of tomatoes under laboratory conditions

Tomato good agricultural practices, mandatory guidelines in Florida, do not have specific regulations for glove use during tomato harvesting. The objective of the research reported here was to evaluate Salmonella transfer from contaminated gloves to tomatoes and vice versa upon single and subsequent touches. Experiments were performed using mature, green, round tomatoes with two types of gloves (reusable and single use) and two hygienic conditions of reusable glove (clean and dirty [fouled with tomato leaves]). The transfer scenarios used during experiments were glove to tomato, tomato to glove, and glove to up to 25 subsequently touched tomatoes. The inoculated surface (6 log CFU per surface), after drying for 24 h, touched the uninoculated surface for 5 s. Salmonella populations from gloves and tomatoes were enumerated on nonselective and selective agar supplemented with 80 μg/ml rifampin. Enrichments were performed when counts fell below the detection limit. The rates of Salmonella transfer to tomatoes during a single touch were similar for single-use and reusable gloves; transfer from tomatoes to gloves was higher to single-use gloves than to reusable gloves under wet (0 h) inoculation conditions. Dirty reusable gloves did not transfer more Salmonella than clean reusable gloves during single contact under any conditions. When a single glove was sequentially touched to multiple tomatoes, clean reusable gloves transferred higher levels of Salmonella to the first few tomatoes touched than did single-use gloves and dirty reusable gloves. As workers' gloves became dirty over time during harvest, the risk of Salmonella transfer to tomatoes did not increase.