Bacterial Contamination of Food Handlers in X Hospital Palembang

¹ Student of Environmental Science Department, Universitas Sriwijaya, Palembang - Indonesia
² Health Education and Training Centre of Sumatera Selatan Province, Palembang - Indonesia
³ Medical Study Department, Medical Faculty, Universitas Sriwijaya, Palembang - Indonesia
⁴ Chemistry Department, Mathematics and Natural Science Faculty, Universitas Sriwijaya, Palembang - Indonesia
⁵ Food Processing Department, Agriculture Faculty, Universitas Sriwijaya, Palembang - Indonesia

^* Corresponding author email: utariutari76@yahoo.com

Abstract

The food handlers in Hospital with the bad personal hygiene could be a potential source of infection of a pathogenic organism. The responsibility of hospital food handlers is greater compared with the common food handlers such as in restaurants, etc. This is because they should provide the healthy food to the patients in Hospital who might have low immunity, and the contaminated food could have very dangerous consequences. This study aimed to investigate the potential contamination of food handlers in X hospital, Palembang. The study was carried out by a cross-sectional method on food handlers’. There were 30 respondents examined in this study. The bacterial examination was conducted by following the standard procedures of World Health Organization (WHO). The results showed that there were 11 (36.7%) from 30respondents positively contaminated by Escherichia coliand there all respondent contaminated in samples were women. There was no worker contaminated by Staphylococcus aureus. The study proved that in X hospital of Palembang, there were some food handlers contaminated by Escherichia coli.