Business & Tech

Health Inspectors Keep Bacteria Off the Menu

The Bucks County Department of Health inspects hundreds of restaurants and cafeterias each year to ensure there are no public safety dangers lurking in the kitchens.

In 2003, tainted green onions served at a Chi-Chi's restaurant in western Pennsylvania sparked an outbreak of Hepatitis A that infected more than 500 patrons, killing at least four. The green onions originated from a farm in Mexico, but the investigation by the Center for Disease Control suggested that the storage and preparation of the green onions contributed to the outbreak.

Settlements from the lawsuits effectively forced Chi-Chi's to close its restaurants in North America in 2004.

It is exactly this type of scenario that Bucks County Director of Environmental Health Bill Roth and his team of health inspectors hope to prevent.

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"We are not trying to put anybody out of business," said Roth. "By educating restaurant owners on proper food handling techniques, we can avoid a situation like that. If a restaurant was responsible for a foodborne outbreak, the publicity alone would kill them."

Since the department started posting inspection reports online, Roth has seen interest in the paperwork grow. As hungry residents begin browsing through the reports, looking for restaurants with perfect bills of health, Roth says the quality of the violations are more important than the quantity.

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"Six violations is pretty low for a restaurant, depending on what they are," said Roth. "You need to make sure they don't have critical violations."

Roth separates the critical violations into three main categories: Food preparation, food display and food storage. Severe and continuous red flags in these areas can lead to potential public health hazards.

"We look at how the food is handled, is someone preparing food without gloves," said Roth. "Is it not being thawed at the proper temperature?"

Starting out as a health inspector himself, Roth has spent the past 44 years educating restaurant owners on the proper ways to handle the food. In the beginning, the facts did not always go over well with the cooks and owners.

"I was this 21 year-old kid inspecting restaurants in Bristol owned by these big guys much older than me," said Roth. "One time I went in, and roaches were crawling everywhere, the sewage was backed up, just really bad. We didn't have cell phones back then, of course, so I had to use their own phone to call and get them shut down."

Over time, Roth has seen the importance of food handling and preparation sink in.

"We haven't had a major issue with a restaurant in a long time," said Roth. "There's more information out there, the owners are better educated. The best thing to do is have a certified food safety manager on site at all times."

The scope of Roth's department is not limited to county restaurants. His team of 24 inspectors, separated into three offices in Levittown, Doylestown and Quakertown, go into any establishment that prepares food on site, including schools and supermarkets.

Every place gets inspected at least once a year. The performance on the evalutation determines how often the inspectors return. They can be placed anywhere from a 180-day cycle to a 60 or 90-day routine.

If a restaurant has a chronic problem with violations, they can be placed on administrative suspension. The owners will then have to attend a hearing where they must present an action plan for getting the restaurant back up to code.

In the rare instance, an inspector has the ability to shut down a restaurant immediately if they feel the public health is at risk.

"It has to be really bad," said Roth. "There could be a dozen critical violations, the sewage could be backing up into the kitchen. There have been a couple of those within this year."


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