991013 Lax Inspection At Big U.S. Restaurants?October 2, 1999San Francisco - A local neighborhood "greasy spoon" may NOT be the most dangerous place to eat. A study in Los Angeles found it was the biggest and busiest restaurants that were most likely to be blamed for cases of food poisoning. And they said harried restaurant inspectors were most likely to avoid precisely those restaurants. Udo Buchholtz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and colleagues at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services looked at 144 restaurants that had been recently inspected but where customers had still caught some kind of suspected food poisoning. They found the biggest restaurants were the most likely sources of food poisoning cases, but found they were the least likely restaurants to have been inspected recently. This is probably because the county has only 140 inspectors who have to look at 21,000 restaurants, he told a meeting of infectious disease experts sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology. "It is most likely that the inspectors have a very high workload and it is natural ... that they do the easy restaurants very frequently," he said in an interview. He said the largest restaurants had 400 seats or more and would each take three to four hours to inspect. "If you have to do 11 inspections in a day, you can see why they would avoid those," he said. Buchholtz's group checked out the restaurants themselves and found the problems were obvious -- workers not washing their hands, food such as tortilla chips being reused, and a failure to use thermometers to make sure food was cooked through. Sometimes food was not stored properly or raw meat was stored where it could drip onto vegetables. "In the meantime, based on our findings, we have changed the inspection system in L.A county," he said. The restaurants are sorted into three risk groups, and those where contamination is most likely -- where raw food is handled, for example -- must be inspected three times a year. Low-risk establishments such as service stations where people can buy hot dogs and candy need only be inspected once a year. Buchholtz said it is too soon to tell whether the changes have made a difference.
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