While restaurants continue to enforce their stringent cleaning protocols and other preventative measures during this pandemic, as cold weather settles in, they also face the traditional norovirus season. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), most norovirus outbreaks occur from November through April. 1
As contaminated surfaces are a common transmission route for norovirus and other foodborne pathogens, cleaning and sanitizing high-touch surfaces are fundamental practices in the foodservice industry. But it's not an easy task to keep surfaces clean to prevent the spread of norovirus and other foodborne illnesses. That's because consumers and employees touch everything – doorknobs, menus, tables, bread baskets, bathrooms, credit cards, and more – and sometimes do so without even knowing they're sick.
In 2017, the CDC identified restaurants, specifically those with sit-down dining, as the most common location associated with foodborne disease outbreaks. 2 Of the outbreaks caused by infected food workers, 54 percent involved food workers touching ready-to-eat foods with their bare hands. Additionally, one in five foodservice workers has reported working while sick with vomiting and diarrhea, hallmark symptoms of norovirus. 3
Since norovirus is the number one cause of foodborne illness in the United States, foodservice establishments need to better understand this virus to stop its spread.
Understanding Norovirus Outbreaks
The CDC estimates that norovirus causes 19-21 million cases of vomiting and diarrhea illnesses each year, with 109,000 hospitalizations and 900 deaths. 3
According to the CDC, individuals can be infectious for several hours prior to displaying symptoms and can continue to shed the virus for several days after symptoms have resolved. 3 Additionally, norovirus remains infectious on foods even at freezing temperatures and until heated above 140°F, according to the CDC. It can remain infectious on countertops, serving utensils, and other surfaces for weeks. 3
Norovirus prevention goes further than back-of-house precautions, though. Ready-to-eat foods like French fries and bread baskets are typically served from the front of the house, providing another opportunity to transfer germs on the front lines.
The combination of these factors causes extra strain on foodservice establishments and employees to maintain proper hygiene and food safety standards. It's important to create food safety awareness among both back-of-house and front-of-house staff and remind them that their actions impact customers and co-workers alike.
How to minimize risk of norovirus
The opportunity for norovirus outbreaks will continue to exist; it's just human nature. However, effective sanitizing solutions and proper compliance will reduce the risk of illness and prevent an outbreak from occurring in a foodservice establishment. Here are some tips to minimize contamination levels in your establishment:
- Keep sick employees home. Preventing employees from coming to work sick with norovirus is the number one way to prevent norovirus outbreaks from happening in foodservice establishments. 4 Employees that come to work sick spread the virus to foods, surfaces, customers, and even guests.
- Practice proper hand hygiene and minimize bare-hand contact with food. Inadequate hand hygiene and bare hand contact with foods are the most frequently encountered contributing factors to norovirus outbreaks. 5 Ensure that staff are trained on when to wash, and how to wash, as recommended by the U.S. Food Code. 6 Additionally, ensure bare-hand contact with foods is minimized by emphasizing proper glove use.
- Disinfect high-touch surfaces regularly. Norovirus can survive on surfaces for weeks and can even spread through surfaces. Make sure to disinfect high-touch surfaces such as doorknobs, menus, tables, and restroom surfaces, on a frequent basis.
- Clean before you sanitize. Proper surface sanitizing requires the surface to be cleaned first to remove all food debris, fats, oils, and other soils. In fact, the U.S. Food Code requires that all food contact surfaces must be cleaned before the sanitizing step. 6 This ensures that the sanitizer solution will remain effective, as these soils can interfere with the sanitizer's effectiveness.
- Use sanitizing solutions approved for use on food-contact surfaces, with no rinse required. Choose sanitizers that are tough on germs while approved for use on food contact surfaces based on the label information. Also, use products with short contact times to ensure efficacy (e.g., a minute or less for organisms of interest).
- Properly manage reusable cloths (or ditch them altogether). While the U.S. Food Code allows for the use of reusable cloths to wipe food debris from surfaces, 6 they can spread germs if not properly maintained. Store cloths in a container with appropriate sanitizer at the required concentration when not in use. Ensure that the sanitizer solution is changed when it appears dirty or when the concentration drops below its effective range. Switching to applying a food contact sanitizer by spray bottle or by a disposable wipe can reduce some of the headaches (and risks) associated with reusable cloths.
- Store bodily fluid spill kits in both front-of-house and back-of-house operations. In case of emergencies, bodily fluid spill kits help reduce the risk of norovirus outbreaks since stool and vomit particles can spread illness. An individual only needs to ingest a few virus particles to become infected, so ensure that any bodily fluid emergencies are addressed as quickly as possible.
For food safety educational tools and resources, visit: https://www.gojo.com/en/Markets/Foodservice/Hand-Hygiene-Hub/Featured