CDC Studies Show Flaws In Restaurant Food Safety Systems
By Sam Lewis
In an effort to close gaps in restaurant food safety, agency will launch new training and surveillance tools in early 2014
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a set of studies this week that revealed some gaping holes in food safety systems of American restaurants. Among the unsafe practices were improper handling of raw beef and chicken, along with shipping temperatures that were too high for green vegetables.
The research was conducted by the Environmental Health Specialists Network (EHS-Net) along with experts from the CDC, local and state agencies, the FDA, and the USDA. The findings of the studies were published in the Journal of Food Protection, and focus on the handling of raw beef, chicken, and leafy greens. The CDC notes that more than half of all foodborne illness outbreaks in the U.S. are linked to restaurants, schools, banquet facilities, and other food service establishments.
The study involving ground beef includes observations of ground beef preparation at nearly 400 restaurants across eight states — CA, CO, CT, GA, MN, NY, OR, and TN — along with interviews with managers of those food service establishments. Nearly two-thirds of the restaurants in the study were chain-owned. According to the CDC findings, 81 percent of restaurants in the study use subjective means to determine how thoroughly hamburger is cooked and nearly 50 percent do not check final cooking temperature of beef. In restaurants where workers handled raw beef with bare hands, over 60 percent did not wash their hands after handling and preparation.
The study devoted to chicken had EHS-Net interviewing nearly 450 restaurant managers. The study found that many restaurants are not following FDA guidance in preparation, cooking, and preventing cross-contamination and that many restaurant managers “lacked basic food safety knowledge about chicken.” The interviews uncovered that 40 percent of food service establishment managers never, rarely, or occasionally designate specific cutting boards for raw poultry. More than 50 percent of those interviewed say thermometers aren’t used to determine final cooking temperatures of chicken, with only 43 percent knowing the recommended final cooking temperature.
Finally, researchers interviewed nearly 350 food establishment managers to investigate the shipping, handling, and temperatures of almost 40 leafy vegetable deliveries. Two-thirds of restaurant managers say they have turned away vegetable shipments from being in the wrong temperature range, looking or smelling bad, or missing required labeling. Almost all interviewed managers have kept records of their vegetable purchases and have complied with FDA guidance for record keeping and rejecting shipments, vital to tracing contaminated products. However, more than half of the study’s tested products were above the FDA temperature guideline, which creates the potential for the growth of foodborne pathogens.
In relation to these studies, the CDC has announced plans to unveil a surveillance system — the National Voluntary Environmental Assessment Information System (NVEAIS) — allowing state and local agencies to investigate the environmental factors of foodborne illness outbreaks. “The system provides an avenue to capture underlying environmental assessment data that describes what happened and how events most likely lead to a foodborne outbreak,” says the CDC. The CDC has also promised to provide a free, interactive, electronic training course “to help state and local health departments investigate foodborne illness outbreaks in restaurants and other food service venues as a member of a larger outbreak response team, identify an outbreak's environmental causes, and recommend appropriate control measures.” Both the training course and NVEAIS are scheduled to be unveiled in early 2014.
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