To: All Missouri State Dining Students

From:  Shelly Duran General Manager of Dining Services

Date:  April 30, 2009

Subject: H1N1 Virus (Swine Flu)

 

Dear Students,

 

As you all know our country faces a potential crisis with the H1N1 virus and the issues that could stem from an outbreak, a number of you have already voiced concerns about potential issues in the dining centers with regards to the proper use of latex gloves in the facilities.

 

I would like to assure you that we are currently following the recommend guidelines of the proper use and wearing of latex gloves according to the Greene County Health Department as well as Sodexo’s health and food safety department.  Our employees are required to wear the gloves when handling ready to eat food.  There is a strong perception that if an employee is wearing gloves then the food is safe and protected.  This could not be further from the truth.  The only thing that is truly protected is the food service workers hands.  The very best way to prevent any type of cross contamination is through proper and frequent hand washing.  We train all of our employees about this from the very first day are hired with us with multiple reminders throughout the course of their employment with us.

 

Sodexo recently sent out a memo that we have distributed to all of our employees in addition to communications with all of our employees regarding some good tips for preventing the spread of germs they are:

1.        Avoid close contact of people who are sick

2.      Stay home and away from others when you are sick

3.      Always cover your mouth and nose

4.      CLEAN YOUR HANDS- every time you come in contact with a surface or change an activity, wash/sanitize your hands.

5.      Avoid touching eyes, nose or mouth

6.      Practice good health habits.

The following information is a study that was done in regards to “Gloves vs. Bare hands”

There's something reassuring about watching restaurant workers handle our food with gleaming gloves, but the appearance of extra cleanliness may be no more than that -- appearance. That's what a team of Oklahoma scientists suggests after studying the flora and fauna on hundreds of tortillas purchased at fast food eateries in Oklahoma and Kansas.

The tortilla testing team, led by Robert Lynch, an occupational and environmental health professor at the University of Oklahoma, was addressing a meaty debate among food safety scientists -- whether donning gloves actually lowers the chance that germs end up in food and thus the chance that customers will come down with food poisoning.

The case for gloves: They keep food away from bare hands, which are constantly touching items such as money, raw food, door handles and faucets -- the kind of places illness-causing microbes can end up.

The case against gloves: They're only squeaky clean if they're new, and they won't help matters if they foster a culture of complacency and backsliding on hand-washing.

In the study, published in the January issue of the Journal of Food Protection, Lynch and co-workers chose tortillas as a test case and purchased 371 of them, one at a time, at 140 restaurants from four fast food chains in Wichita, Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

Roughly half of the samples were collected from gloved workers, the others from those who were ungloved.

The scientists sealed the tortillas in sterile containers, stuffed them in a cooler and transported them to a microbiology lab.

There, a small piece of each tortilla was blended in sterile fluid and cultured in nutrients to see what grew -- and, specifically, if microbes that flourish inside us would show up.

The reassuring news: Very few of the samples spawned cultures of the microbes being tested, which included Escherichia coli (some forms of which can make us sick) and Staphylococcus aureus (a germ that's common around the nose, mouth and rectum and that can cause skin infections).

The disconcerting news: There was no statistical difference between glove-handled tortillas and ones that were touched by human flesh. Tortillas handled with gloves gave rise to microbe growth 9.6% of the time; those touched with hands, 4.4% of the time. But the sample size was not large enough to establish that the rates were truly different.

Dean Cliver, a professor of food safety at UC Davis, said he wasn't too surprised by the findings, because studies have shown that dirty hands almost inevitably contaminate the outside of gloves as the user puts them on.

"The main purpose of gloves is they look good to customers and inspectors. The only possible exception is if people have some kind of skin infection," he said. "Hand-washing is still key.