PROVO — Many restaurant patrons assume that when they are served food, it has been prepared by workers who either wear gloves or touch food only with utensils. But under current regulations, Utah County restaurants are sometimes allowed to contact ready-to-eat foods with bare hands.
Though many restaurants have internal rules requiring the use of gloves, and all are required by the county to minimize the amount of bare-hand contact, the Utah County Health Department says its top public complaint is bare-hand contact with food.
"This is our No. 1 complaint from the public," said Utah County Health Department Environmental Health Director Terry Beebe. "And when we tell them we don't have a rule in place that says they (workers) can't contact that ready-to-eat food with their bare hands, most of them (the complainers) are miffed by that, and surprised. They feel like it's a common-sense thing that was already in place, that we would be enforcing such a rule."
The Utah County Board of Health is looking to change all that. On Monday, the board will take public comment and consider adopting a no bare-hands policy for ready-to-eat food.
"There have been a lot of scientific studies done showing that washing your hands alone isn't the most effective way of eliminating foodborne illnesses that are passed by hands," said Beebe.
Though the Food and Drug Administration does not mandate any food-handling procedures for states, it does publish guidelines based on its research. While the current FDA food code suggests that states adopt a no bare-hand contact rule, Utah's law only requires employees to minimize bare-hand contact.
Beebe said the majority of foodborne illnesses are viruses, not bacteria, and hand-washing isn't very effective in combating the spread of viruses.
"Hand washing is an effective deterrent for bacteria growth but not necessarily for viruses and protozoa," he said. "Most of your more common foodborne illnesses today aren't necessarily bacteria-related. The most common is the Norwalk-type virus contaminants, and that's not easily destroyed by washing your hands, and it doesn't take that many viruses to cause a food-borne illness."
The Utah Restaurant Association opposes the change, preferring to stick with the state guideline of minimizing bare-hand contact.
"When you start talking about eliminating bare-hand contact, that's virtually impossible," said association president Melva Sine. "Restaurants are not like manufacturing units where there's just one person that is doing one job and and then doing that job all day long. It's multi-tasked, and that's going to create a difficult situation to try to comply with absolutely no bare-hand contact in every situation."
Sine expressed concern that if restaurants go to gloving, employees may not wash their hands as much as necessary.
"If you take the focus off of hand-washing and say now we're going to gloves, then we lose the focus on the most important issue here," she said. "Gloves create a false sense of security where the person who's wearing gloves is protected, but not necessarily anyone anywhere else. There's no research that says if you use gloves, you're going to have this kind of a decrease in food safety problems or anything that might relate to that."
Beebe emphasized that the policy would not mandate the use of gloves.
"There are a lot of ways to do this without gloves: tongs, spatulas, deli tissues — there are a whole bunch of things that you can do," he said.
Sine said the regulation is not necessary because most restaurants already use utensils to handle food.
"You see many, many restaurants going to that, so really, you see people minimizing bare-hand contact right now in most restaurants," she said.
Beebe also said that restaurateurs could request exceptions to the rule from the health department if they have specific problems or needs.
"There are situations we'll look at on a case-by-case basis where it may be difficult to accomplish what they're doing without using their bare hands, in which case we'd have to take a look at it," he said. "But it's not saying you can't use bare hands, it's (about) not using your bare hands on ready-to-eat food."
The Salt Lake Valley Health Department adopted a no bare-hands policy about five years ago, according to Environmental Health Supervisor Eric Peterson. He said many restaurants resisted at first, but the industry is moving toward no bare-hand contact on its own now.
"Wendy's is one of the leaders in the fast-food chain, and they are adamant about no bare-hand contact — they were doing it before we pushed it," he said. "A lot of the big industry chains recognize the benefit themselves and have helped us to enforce it."
Peterson said the benefit of a no bare-hands policy for the Salt Lake Valley isn't really measurable, but he believes some outbreaks of illness could have been prevented if restaurants had been in compliance.
"Many of the large, foodborne outbreaks that we have seen, one of the potential causes was no bare-hand contact control, with viral outbreaks," he said. "There's been a link there. There were also other problems, we can't say that's (bare-hand contact) the only reason there was an outbreak, but it was a definite potential."
If you go ...
The Utah County Board of Health will meet Monday at 4 p.m. at 151 S. University Ave, Suite 2500, to take comments and discuss the proposed policy.
E-mail: mdecker@desnews.com