Restaurants on guard to ward off hepatitis

Source: The Detroit News
BLOOMFIELD HILLS - In the immaculate kitchens of the 13 restaurants he owns, chef Matt Prentice prowls the food preparation areas, alert for any slips in discipline.

"What are you doing? What do you think you're doing?" he snapped at one employee recently. At the woman's confused look, he gestured impatiently toward the sink. "You touched your hair - go wash your hands."

It's been more than a year since Oakland County has suffered a major restaurant health scare, and if Prentice and the 4,000-plus other restaurateurs have their way, that streak will continue. None have forgotten the way business dropped off in the late 1990s, when back-to-back hepatitis A outbreaks sickened hundreds of people in the county.

Nor have Oakland County health officials, who are in the midst of an effort to train at least one worker in every single county restaurant in proper food preparation safety. To date, more than 1,000 workers have gone through the 16-hour program and returned to work to train others.

The hepatitis A virus attacks the liver and causes flu-like symptoms in its victims: high fever, nausea, fatigue and jaundice. It is usually spread when an infected person fails to wash his or her hands after going to the bathroom, and then touches another person's food or drink.

"This is very, very basic stuff," said Prentice, who has sent staff from all his restaurants through the county training program. "It's a matter of hand washing, proper temperatures. We train all our employees - and then we monitor them. Because it's hard for someone to be on guard every minute."

Although it is rarely fatal, one man died during a hepatitis outbreak in West Bloomfield in 1997 and more than 80 were sickened by tainted restaurant food in back-to-back incidents.

That death and those illnesses might never have happened if a single food worker had washed his hands. Soap and water would have killed the virus, which is primarily spread when feces from an infected person gets into the mouth of another person, generally from hands, food or a toy.

"It all boils down to people not understanding what they're doing, not associating hygiene with safety," said Keith Krinn, chief of environmental health for Oakland County, who supervises the food safety program. "We're really happy with the way the program's going so far. The more people who know, the safer we'll all be."

The lessons cover territory most people learned in kindergarten -- wash your hands after you go to the bathroom -- and the other basic precautions that will kill most food-borne diseases: Store food in a cool place; cook long enough and hot enough to kill any bacteria; and keep raw meats separate from other foods.

The county hopes to have a certified food preparation worker in every restaurant in Oakland by the year 2004. New restaurants are already required to send workers through the seminar before they can open.

Prentice, who caught hepatitis A as an eighth grader and still vividly remembers the discomfort, reacted swiftly when one of his employees had a hepatitis scare. He paid $125 for hepatitis A vaccinations for every food service worker in his restaurants.

He praises the county's training efforts, which he believes reflect a change from days when health inspectors seemed more focused on punishing restaurants for health violations than helping them solve the problems.

"Twenty-five years ago, when I first started in this business, everybody was afraid of the health department," Prentice said. "When we had a scare, the first person I called was the health department."

The hepatitis A outbreaks of the late 1990s hit not only Oakland, but the entire state of Michigan. The incidence of the disease jumped from an average of about 300 cases in Michigan each year to 1,372 in 1997 and 2,135 in 1998. In Oakland, cases jumped from 61 in 1996 to 178 in 1997 and 333 in 1998.

Sources of the outbreak ranged from tainted strawberries that sickened hundreds of Michigan school children to tainted coleslaw that sent dozens of Oakland County residents to the hospital.

Although the food supply in the United States is one of the safest in the world, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that 76 million people get sick, more than 300,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die each year from food-borne illness.
Source: The Detroit News