Five keys to growing safer fruits and vegetables: promoting health by decreasing microbial contamination
WHO published the manual Five keys to growing safer fruits and vegetables: promoting health by decreasing microbial contamination. With this manual, WHO is extending the Five Keys to Safer Food concept to cover additional groups across the farm to table continuum to promote safe food handling practices and prevent foodborne diseases.
The manual describes key practices to reduce microbial contamination of fresh fruits and vegetables during planting, growing, harvesting, and packaging and raises awareness of the links between the health of humans, animals and ecosystems and how failures in good hygienic practices in one sector can affect the others.
The manual is designed to support food safety education of rural workers who grow fresh fruits and vegetables for themselves, their families and for sale in local markets.
This edition of the manual is a Trial edition for field testing. It is actually used in El Salvador in the context of a Joint UN programme "Protecting children: towards a coordinated food security and nutritional programme." This programme is part of the MDG-Achievement Fund's efforts to help El Salvador achieve the Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty and inequality.
The concept of the training course was initially presented to health educators in Belize and the manual was subsequently pilot-tested in Guatemala in collaboration with the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) country office and the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP) through the organization of training sessions.
