Irish food outlets fail to an "astounding" degree to implement good hygiene safety procedures, an environmental health conference heard yesterday. Takeaways and public houses were said to be the worst offenders.
The safest places to eat, from a hygiene point of view, were hotels and hospitals. The situation could only be rectified by introducing licensing of food premises.
The conference was organised by the Environmental Health Officers Association and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health Northern Ireland and held in Newcastle, Co Down.
The conference also heard of relatively poor testing procedures by local authorities in the Republic for a parasite which can cause diarrhoea and vomiting.
Ms Gwen Neary, a Dublin-based environmental health officer with the Eastern Regional Health Authority, studied hygiene policy and practice in 107 high-risk city food premises.
Her aim was to establish the extent to which they complied with a hygiene procedure called the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), which food outlets are obliged to implement.
Food outlets using the HACCP procedure are expected to identify and deal with possible risks from rodents, dirty utensils, poor washing and toilet facilities and other factors.
The researcher found that only four out of nine takeaways regularly set bait for rats and mice. Three quarters of takeaways and two thirds of public houses provided no basic food-hygiene training for staff.
She found was that staff and managers in nearly half the premises she surveyed had little or no knowledge of the system. Knowledge was particularly poor in takeaways.
What she found astounding, she said, was that only three out of the 107 premises had completely implemented the hygiene procedure. These were two hospitals and a large bakery.
Again, takeaways and public houses came out worst: 78 per cent of takeaways and 63 per cent of public houses were not even in the process of implementing the hygiene procedure, she said.
She recommended a licensing system in which licences would only be granted for premises fully compliant with HACCP.
In another research project, Ms Mary Keane, a principal environmental health officer based in Dublin, found that very few local authorities were following the guidelines for detecting the presence of the cryptosporidium parvum parasite in water.
Water can be polluted with the parasite by animals defecating and by slurry and sewage effluent. The conference continues today.