Flour Dust and Health

The known hazards of flour dust and improvers

Flour dust is a hazardous substance within the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) Regulations 2002. Along with its small particle size flour dust is a respiratory sensitiser and is known to cause allergic rhinitis and occupational asthma. Flour dust is also an irritant and may give rise to short term respiratory, nasal and eye symptoms. It may provoke an asthmatic attack in individuals with pre-existing disease and lead to chronic bronchitis.

Flour, flour additives and spices may also act as skin irritants but perhaps more commonly the handling of moist doughs, frequent hand washing, and exposure to detergents are the predominant cause of irritant contact dermatitis within the bakery industry. Flour is also a skin sensitiser.

Visits and information

The HSE and local authorities hope by making information available and by visiting bakeries and pizza parlours to improve good practice amongst workers exposed to flour dust and dust from enzyme-containing flour additives in bakeries and other food preparation premises where flour is used.

Disease Reduction

The HSE’s Disease Reduction Programme aims to contribute to ill health reduction targets by achieving a 2.4% reduction in the incidence of chemically induced ill health. The Respiratory Disease and Skin Disease Projects aim to achieve a 10% reduction in the incidence of occupational asthma.

Ten top tips with flour and powdered ingredients

  1. Handle flour and powdered ingredients carefully. Minimise the use of dusting flour.
  2. Use dredgers or sprinklers to spread dusting flour rather that hand throwing.
  3. Avoid spillages of flour where possible and where spillages do happen clean up immeadiately.
  4. Take care to avoid raising dust while loading ingredients into mixers.
  5. Start up mixers at a slow speed until all ingredients are combined together and not likely to give off dust.
  6. Avoid damage to bags of ingredients.
  7. Minimise the creation of airborne dust when folding and disposing of empty ingredient bags. One effective method involves rolling up bags from the bottom while tipping avoiding the need to flatten or fold empty bags.
  8. Avoid using compressed airlines for cleaning.
  9. do not use brushes to dry sweep dust as this will produce high levels of airborne dust. High efficiency industrial vacuum cleaners can be used for general cleaning. Large amounts of waste ingredients should be shovelled up.
  10. Wear a suitable mask for any essentail short term dusty tasks.

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