Benjamin Chapman
Translated by Albert Amgar
L'infosheet de cette semaine est un document d’information sur l’hygiène alimentaire qui cible ceux qui préparent les aliments. Elle est disponible sur le site : www.foodsafetyinfosheets.com
L’infosheet met l’accent sur :
- Un navire de croisière, Grand Princess, a récemment été victime d’une deuxième éclosion consécutive à norovirus affectant 57 personnes parmi les 2 468 passagers à bord.
- Pour maîtriser la propagation de norovirus, utilisez les moyens adaptés pour nettoyer les vomissures; ces moyens comprennent des gants latex, un masque à filtre et un tablier jetables.
- De nombreux désinfectants pour les mains ont une efficacité limitée à réduire norovirus sur les mains.
- Les agents pathogènes peuvent être présents sous forme d’aérosols lors du vomissement et se propager en dehors des zones visuellement affectées.
Les infosheets sont crées chaque semaine et sont affichées dans des restaurants, magasins, et fermes, et sont utilisées mondialement pour des formations. Si vous avez une demande de sujet ou des photos, contactez Ben Chapman à benjamin_chapman@ncsu.edu Vous pouvez suivre les infosheets, des histoires sur l’hygiène alimentaire et barfblog sur twitter @benjaminchapman et @barfblog.

The U.K. Mirror reports dozens of British holidaymakers on a Mediterranean cruise were yesterday confined to their cabins after norovirus swept through the ship.

Passengers aboard the Grand Princess liner started to become violently sick just moments after the boat set sail from Southampton.

More than 2,500 people are on board - and the number of people becoming ill was said to be growing by the hour.

Just two medics are aboard and they are having to run from cabin to cabin to treat the sick - many of whom are pensioners. Passengers David and Jackie Greenslade - who paid £3,500 for their trip - have been confined to cabin since Wednesday.

Sales manager David, 57, from Poole, Dorset, said,

"It was supposed to be a dream holiday but it's turned into a nightmare. People are dropping like flies."

There aren’t enough castles with moats.

At least not anymore.

But Cardiff Castle in Wales, which dates back to 3rd century Romans, has a lovely moat constructed by the Normans to fend off the locals as they pillaged their way across what is now the U.K.

The food has been uneventful, all of it served piping hot as the Brits suffer through their worst snow and cold in 30 years. To watch the constant news and weather reports on BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 4, and Sky News – there is one movie channel that seems to feature bad 1980s American fare – and read the newspaper accounts, the country is in chaos and everything has been shut for at least two days.

We drove from Cardiff to Manchester when people were told to stay off the roads and it was completely uneventful, what with the couple of inches of snow. Guess they aren’t used to that around here.

Some attempted to escape the weather, only to end up barfing.

USA Today today reports that Britain's Fred Olsen Cruise Lines has ordered an early end to a cruise to the Canary Islands after a massive outbreak of what is believed to be norovirus.

The UK's Daily Mail reports at least 289 of 795 passengers on Fred Olsen's Boudicca this week have been struck down by the illness. At 36% of passengers, it's one of the most widespread outbreaks of a norovirus-like illness recorded on a cruise ship in years. Even the worst outbreaks of norovirus rarely spread beyond 10% of passengers.

The outbreak, moreover, is the third in a row for the ship and comes as another Fred Olsen vessel, the Balmoral, also struggles with a major outbreak of norovirus-like illness -- it's third in a year.

Chapman says that while dirty bathrooms can be gross, like the gotcha moments on hidden camera programs, there really isn't any information that suggests a place with a dirty bathroom is any more or less likely to cause an outbreak than a place with a clean bathroom. Lots of restaurants have separate handwashing facilities in the kitchen, and risk-based inspection systems focus on factors that lead to illness as identified by the CDC and WHO -- not the floors, walls and ceilings, and how many flies are on a fly strip.

But what about on cruise ships?

A team of researchers from Boston University School (BUSM), Carney Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance and Tufts University School of Medicine, have found that widespread poor compliance with regular cleaning of public restrooms on cruise ships may predict subsequent norovirus infection outbreaks (NoVOs).

This study, which appears in the November 1st issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, is the first study of environmental hygiene on cruise ships.
Outbreaks of acute gastroenteritis (AGE) often occur in close populations, such as among cruise ship passengers. Recent epidemiologic investigations of outbreaks of AGE confirmed that 95 percent of cruise ship AGE outbreaks are caused by norovirus.

Despite biannual sanitation monitoring and hand hygiene interventions among passengers and crew members, 66 ships monitored by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experienced NoV infection outbreaks (NoVOs) between 2003 and 2008.

Trained health care professionals evaluated the thoroughness of disinfection cleaning of six standardized objects (toilet seat, flush handle or button, toilet stall inner handhold, stall inner door handle, restroom inner door handle, and baby changing table surfaces) with high potential for fecal contamination in cruise ship public restrooms.

The researchers found only 37 percent of the 273 randomly selected public restrooms that were evaluated on 1,546 occasions were cleaned daily. The overall cleanliness of the six standardized surfaces on each ship ranged from four to 100 percent. Although some objects in most restrooms were cleaned at least daily, on 275 occasions no objects in a restroom were cleaned for at least 24 hours.