USA Today‘s Alison Young reviewed inspection reports for hundreds of restaurants at 10 airports and found a large number of critical violations, including 42 percent of the restaurants reviewed at Seattle-Tacoma and 77 percent of restaurants reviewed at Reagan National Airport.
The most common culprits? “Grab-and-go” sandwiches and related foods, which aren’t kept cold enough to ward off food-borne pathogens.
Young notes that it’s hard to pinpoint the number sickened by airport sandwiches, as it’s difficult to track foodborne illness back to a specific source even when the customers aren’t constantly boarding airplanes and taking off for all corners of the earth.
Scott Hensley, on NPR’s Shots blog, recently noted an FDA warning to a Denver kitchen that prepared thousands of meals a day for airlines:
We can sum up the findings in the LSG SkyChefs facility a few months back with a four-letter abbreviation used to describe the roaches and other insects found there: TNTC.
That stands for Too Numerous To Count.
Hensley runs down some of the other problems found there and a reaction from the company spokeswoman.
AHCJ resources
Lifting the shroud: Using multiple-cause-of-death data
Fatal Food: A study of illness outbreaks
Recent news
Loophole allows E. coli-tainted meat to be sold
Meat, dairy products transported in unsafe temperatures, overlooked by inspectors
Airlines delay testing of onboard water
Salmonella outbreak: A selection of recent stories
N.Y. school districts not meeting federal guidelines on cafeteria inspections
Private companies, not the FDA, increasingly perform food safety inspections
Web sites
Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy
Outbreak Alert! Database
