A major survey of food workers has revealed that over half (52 per cent) had received no hygiene training.
More worryingly, more than half of all food service proprietors surveyed were not complying with legislation.
In his paper to the Environmental Health Conference in Kilkenny, Mr John Linnane, lecturer at the School of Hotel and Catering Operations at the Dublin Institute of Technology, noted that offending food handlers were unaware of the risks they had taken and that more often than not the problem was one of negligence.
Mr Linnane said food handlers had failed to put what they had learned into practice. Of the 267 premises surveyed, only two had a written procedure for dealing with a food poisoning outbreak.
He claimed that the significant drop in salmonella food poisoning recorded in 1999 and 2000 was attributable to the safe egg campaign and tighter controls in the poultry industry and not to better hygiene controls.
He concluded that one consequence of a lack of education and training in food safety or alternatively inappropriate hygiene training was an increase in food-borne disease.