Gloves or bare hands?

Do you feel better when you go to a restaurant and see gloved food handlers? According to this story in the LA Times, it's really a wash.

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% of the time; those touched with hands, 4.4% of the time. But the sample size was not large enough to establish that the rates were truly different.

Dean Cliver, a professor of food safety at UC Davis, said he wasn't too surprised by the findings, because studies have shown that dirty hands almost inevitably contaminate the outside of gloves as the user puts them on.

"The main purpose of gloves is they look good to customers and inspectors. The only possible exception is if people have some kind of skin infection," he said. "Hand-washing is still key … gloves are more a matter of keeping up appearances."