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Restaurant Worker Hand Washing

What percentage of restaurant workers comply with the federal Food Code guidelines for hand washing?

January 7, 2011 |
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Supplementary Info

Sources Cited

K. M. Sullivan, M. A. Erickson, C. B. Sandusky, and N. D. Barnard. Detection of phip in grilled chicken entrees at popular chain restaurants throughout california. Nutr Cancer, 60(5):592-602, 2008.

C. Strohbehn, J. Sneed, P. Paez, and J. Meyer. Hand washing frequencies and procedures used in retail food services. J. Food Prot., 71(8):1641-1650, 2008.

Acknowledgements

Transcript

To avoid the cancer-or-E-coli conundrum, we could ask a restaurant to boil or steam our meat, but they’d still have to handle it correctly. You know how bathrooms in restaurants have that sign saying that employees have to wash their hands, well researchers at Iowa State University sent trained observers to 16 restaurants in the Midwest to count how often and how well restaurant employees washed their hands as they prepared our food.
How did they do? Now note that this is handwashing compliance with the U.S. Food Code guidelines, which are pretty strict—like you’re supposed to wash your hands every single time you switch from preparing one food to another, like from meat to veggies. So it’s hard to score 100%; at the same time, they had a researcher sitting there watching them with a clipboard.
Are you so cynical that you think they complied less than 20% of the time? 20 to 40? 40 to 60? 60 to 80? Any optimists for 80 to 100?
It wasn’t 80-100% of the time. Or 60-80. Or even 40-60. “Thus, there was zero percent compliance with Food Code recommendations for handwashing procedures”

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by veganmontreal.

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Dr. Michael Greger

Doctor's Note

Please feel free to post any ask-the-doctor type questions here in the comments section and I’d be happy to try to answer them. And check out theother videos on foodborne illness. Also, there are 1,449 other subjects covered in the rest of my videos--please feel free to explore them as well!

  • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/mgreger/ Michael Greger M.D.

    Please feel free to post any ask-the-doctor type questions here in the comments section and I’d be happy to try to answer them. And check out the other videos on foodborne illness. Also, there are 1,449 other subjects covered in the rest of my videos–please feel free to explore them as well!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=670735069 Tan Truong

    I know it’s pretty gross, but the “[p]roposed benchmarks for the number of times hand washing should occur
    by each employee… [is] 29 times per hour for restaurants” is quite high.

  • Occams_Razor

    Distressing news for a vegan that likes to eat out.

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