On the eve of his deli’s reopening, Mitch Iwan said Wednesday that he has seen the light about the importance of monthly staff seminars about hand-washing and other mainstays of food safety.
“This has been a big education for me,” said Iwan, who plans to offer a free steak-and-eggs breakfast Thursday in an effort to win back his customers, including a portion of the 6,500 who became ill after eating Iwans food in June.
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The Illinois Department of Public Health, which helped investigate the unprecedented E. coli outbreak linked to Iwans Deli and Catering in Orland Park, has also experienced a conversion of sorts about restaurant food safety.
Officials are rethinking the way the state’s 231 local health departments conduct restaurant inspections, and are taking a crack at rewriting the state’s 22-year-old, 100-point restaurant inspection form.
A maverick approach that puts inspectors in the role of an encouraging educator rather than a stern regulator is being touted as a way to put a lid on foodborne illnesses, which nationally cause an estimated 9,000 deaths a year.
“There’s less a feeling of, `Surprise, I’m here and I’m out to get you,’ ” said Darci Newton, health inspector for Lake County, which revamped the old state form with permission in 1994. “This approach is more supportive. The owners call me when their power is out, to ask what they should do.”
The Lake County program–where inspectors visit by appointment and carry pop-quizzes and bilingual training tapes along with their food thermometers and chemical test strips–is the model preferred by the Illinois Restaurant Association, according to executive director Colleen McShane.
“You cannot want to hide from them,” she said of health inspectors. “It’s in the best interest of the restaurant to have the safest food. It’s his bread and butter.”
The new inspection form would be used as a guideline for the state’s 91 certified local health departments and 140 municipalities that do health inspections, and would serve as a starting point for inspectors to educate restaurateurs.
“We’ve recognized for a long time that the (current) inspection form and the scoring system is not a good system,” said Shirley Bohm, food program manager for the Illinois Department of Public Health and chairwoman of the committee that is revamping the form. “It doesn’t really reflect the critical issues we now know cause food-borne illness.”
Mitch Iwan said he was so impressed by the special training conducted by Cook County health officials before the reopening, he has considered running for public office on a platform of increased education programs for all Orland Park restaurant owners.
For now, Iwan plans to hire a firm that will provide refresher courses every six weeks or so.
An intense probe that began when Iwans voluntarily closed June 10 turned up traces of a less damaging strain of E. coli called ETEC in victims’ health samples. But investigators never were able to detect the fragile microbe–which causes what’s commonly called traveler’s diarrhea–in any food or on restaurant surfaces.
And though no one exactly blames the old inspection form on such outbreaks, critics of the method point out that a restaurant could get a high score even if it had serious violations, such as improper food storage; or a deceivingly low score for non-critical violations such as broken light fixtures.
Ever since Lake County began its pass-fail system in 1994, the incidence of foodborne illness has dropped from 165 to 130 last year, according to Colin Thacker, Lake County Health Department director of environmental health.
DuPage County revamped its form in 1990, after a major outbreak of salmonella at the Drury Lane in Oak Brook, which consistently scored in the 90s. An investigation later revealed that 38 of the 50 kitchen workers tested positive for salmonella.
Bohm said most food inspections are handled by county health departments. But in Cook County, which also handles inspections in unincorporated areas, 96 communities run their own program, including certified health departments in Chicago, Evanston, Skokie, Oak Park and Stickney Township.
The old state form, which was used for the inspection Iwans passed shortly before the outbreak, includes a checklist of 45 items in 15 categories, such as food, personnel, and floors, walls and ceilings. Items are weighted, and points are taken off for each violation.
Bohm recently met with 16 representatives from the health inspection field to discuss ways to change the form and expects to have a draft to present to the state’s local health departments by the fall. After getting advice from the departments and approval from a state legislative committee, Bohm hopes the new form, or a variation of it, will become standard industry practice by the end of 1999.