Video observation of food handling behavior in commercial kitchens to evaluate communication tools

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Video observation of food handling behavior in commercial kitchens to evaluate communication tools

Video observation of food handling behavior in commercial kitchens to evaluate communication tools

Pregnant women, small children, and persons with chronic problems such as diabetes, liver cirrhosis, chronic kidney failure, AIDS and cancer are at an increased risk for food-borne illnesses.

You can be exposed to hepatitis A from food prepared anywhere (your home, a friend's home, and, yes, even a restaurant) if the person preparing the food is infected with the hepatitis A virus. Anyone with HCV or cirrhosis should be vaccinated with the Hep A and Hep B Vaccine.

How safe is the food we get from restaurants, cafeterias and other food-service providers?

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June 10 2010

A new study from North Carolina State University — the first study to place video cameras in commercial kitchens to see how precisely food handlers followed food-safety guidelines – discovered that risky practices can happen more often than previously thought.“Meals prepared outside the home have been implicated in up to 70 percent of food poisoning outbreaks, making them a vital focus area for food safety professionals,†says Dr. Ben Chapman, assistant professor and food safety specialist in the department of family and consumer sciences at NC State and lead author of the paper. “We set out to see how closely food handlers were complying with food safety guidance, so that we can determine how effective training efforts are.â€In order to get firsthand data on these food-safety practices, researchers placed small video cameras in unobtrusive spots around eight food-service kitchens that volunteered to

participate in the study. There were as many as eight cameras in each kitchen, which recorded directly to computer files and were later reviewed by Chapman and others. What they found demonstrates the need for new food safety-focused messages and methods targeting food handlers.“We found a lot more risky practices in some areas than we expected,†Chapman says. For example, most previous studies relied on inspection results and self-reporting by food handlers to estimate instances of “cross-contamination†and found that cross-contamination was relatively infrequent. But Chapman’s study found approximately one cross-contamination event per food handler per hour. In other words, the average kitchen worker committed eight cross-contamination errors, which have the potential to lead to illnesses, in the course of the typical eight-hour shift.Cross-contamination occurs when pathogens, such as Salmonella, are transferred from a raw or

contaminated source to food that is ready to eat. For example, using a knife to cut raw chicken and then Continue Reading

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Vaccination for hepatitis A and hepatitis B is recommended for all adults who are at risk of getting hepatitis A or B. Risk factors include: having more than one sex partner in 6 months; being a homosexual male; having sexual contact with infected people; having cirrhosis or chronic hepatitis C; using intravenous (IV) drugs; being on dialysis or receiving blood transfusions; working in healthcare or public safety and being exposed to infected blood or body fluids; being in the military or traveling to high-risk areas; and living with a person who has either hepatitis A or B infection.

http://Hepatitis Cnewdrugs.blogspot.com/2010/06/video-observation-of-food-handling.html