Toronto Public Health has identified a case of Hepatitis A in an employee at a Wendy's restaurant located at 438 Nugget Avenue in Scarborough. Anyone who consumed food purchased at this restaurant between July 26 and August 6 may have been exposed to the hepatitis A virus. The risk of getting the infection is very low.

Depends on how well the employee washed his or her hands and whether they were prepping salads or other fresh product. Don’t eat poop.
 

Line-ups for post hepatatis A IgG shots are expected at Siler City, NC Burger King this weekend after a food handler who worked on August 2 and 3rd has tested positive for the virus.

The Chatham County Public Health Department issued a statement late Friday urging patrons of the restaurant, at 1712 E. 11th St., to be vaccinated for hepatitis A.

Immunizations will be offered for free at the health department, at 1000 S. 10th Ave., Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. and Monday and Tuesday between 8:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

The vaccine can prevent infection up to 14 days after exposure, so those who ate at the Burger King should get an injection by Aug. 17, the health department said.

If I was running a food business, hep A would scare me the most. It often turns out like this: no illnesses linked to the food handler yet (and maybe the individual is the best handwasher out there) but there will still be hundreds of people lining up resulting in pretty bad PR.

Here's an old food safety infosheet detailing a hep A outbreak at a McDonalds in Illinois last year.

Matthew Wald writes in the NY Times this morning that “when an oil worker told investigators on July 23 that an alarm to warn of explosive gas on the Transocean rig in the Gulf of Mexico had been intentionally disabled months before, it struck many people as reckless.

“Reckless, maybe, but not unusual. On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board said that a crash last year on the Washington subway system that killed nine people had happened partly because train dispatchers had been ignoring 9,000 alarms per week. Air traffic controllers, nuclear plant operators, nurses in intensive-care units and others do the same.”

These are problems of human behavior and design in complex systems -- like in a meat processing plant that collects lots of listeria samples but doesn’t act when an increase seems apparent.

If consumers and retailers have food safety recall fatigue, do producers and processors have alarm fatigue – learning to ignore rather than investigate data that may highlight a problem?

In the Maple Leaf 2008 listeria outbreak that killed 22 Canadians, an investigative review found a number of environmental samples detected listeria in the culprit plant months before the public was alerted to possible contamination and that the company failed to recognize and identify the underlying cause of a sporadic yet persistent pattern of environmental test results that were positive for Listeria spp.

Alarms and monitoring systems are established to alert humans – with all their failings – that something requires attention.

Mark R. Rosekind, a psychologist who is a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, told the Times,

“The volume of alarms desensitizes people. They learn to ignore them.”

Wald further writes,

“On the oil rig and in the Guam control tower, the operators were annoyed by false alarms, which sometimes went off in the middle of the night. At the refinery and the reactor, the operators simply did not believe that the alarms would tell them anything very important.

Wald says, “… the alarms conveyed no more urgency to these operators than the drone of a nagging spouse — or maybe the shepherd boy in Aesop’s fable, who cried “Wolf!”

So what to do? The warning systems need to be better designed delivered and continually debated throughout any organization that values a safety culture. Engineers have known this for decades when designing fail-safe systems (sic). The food sector has a lot to learn.
 

Always with the substitute teachers.

Jack Black in The School of Rock appeared not to have hepatitis A or several other diseases from hanging out in all them rock and roll clubs. But he’s a celebrity.

The Grand Rapids Press in Michigan reports that an elementary school substitute teacher at Hastings Public Schools has been diagnosed with hepatitis A, leading school officials to notify parents today because the illness can be contagious.

Especially if that person doesn’t know how to properly wash their hands.

Hastings Superintendent Richard Satterlee said the district sent a letter to parents as a precaution. So far, no students have become ill.