Poorly cleaned public cruise ship restrooms may predict norovirus outbreaks
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.
Bathroom blogging in New York City
Amy, Sorenne and I just got back from a whirlwind trip to New York City.
And when we’re all in the same hotel room, and I wake up early to do some writing, I’ll go to the bathroom, shut the door and blog away.
If I go to NYC for five weeks Thanksgiving to New Year’s holiday orgy in the U.S., I could make $10,000 – for blogging about bathrooms.
Procter & Gamble Co. is looking for five people who will, in return for $10,000, spend five weeks in a Charmin-branded, Manhattan bathroom and blog about the experience.
The five “Charmin Embassadors” will work in the Charmin Restrooms in Times Square from Nov. 23 to Dec. 31. Job requirements include interacting with hundreds of thousands of bathroom guests, maintaining their own blogs and content on Charmin-branded Web sites and popular social media sites, and sharing family-friendly video from the restroom space and surrounding areas.
How is friendly-family video defined? Reminds me of one of the earliest episodes of South Park where adults protesting apparently scandalous TV content inundate the studio and are stricken with foodborne illness – the green apple splatters.
Grandma knows best
I arrived in Kansas City International Airport Saturday evening after a long flight from Rome, Italy. Like many other passengers, once I gathered my belongings from the overhead compartment and the seatback pocket, I headed to the airport bathroom. After I was finished, I washed my hands (just like you’re supposed to) and was delighted to observe what I presumed to be a grandmother and her granddaughter.
“Don’t just slap your hands together, you have to rub them together to get the soap everywhere, then rinse them,” grandma said to granddaughter. It made me smile to know that handwashing is still being taught to the youngsters.
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Wolfgang Puck sued for crappy bathroom
Celebrity blog TMZ reports that celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck is being sued over a restaurant bathroom.
A woman claims she just wanted to take care of some toilet business during a lunch at Puck's most famous Beverly Hills restaurant, Spago back in 2007. But according to the lawsuit, filed in L.A. County Superior Court, the bathroom floor was covered in "standing pools of urine and feces" -- and the only usable toilet didn't have a lock on the door.
The woman also claims she had to use one of her hands to hold the door closed while she took care of business on the throne. But mid-squat, with her hand stuck firmly on the handle, another woman allegedly yanked the door open causing Linden to fall "face-first onto the tile floor."
Reps for Spago claim the woman is completely full of crap when it comes to the cleanliness of their bathrooms -- "In our 27 years of business we've never had an issue close to this ... that portion of the claim is totally without merit."
Wolfgang had some hepatitis A problems back in 2007.
Dirty restaurant restrooms send customers out the door
Rating bathrooms is one of those stories that just won’t go away.
But are restrooms really indicative of restaurant cleanliness?
The Detroit Free Press reports this morning that an online survey of 2,175 adults by Harris Interactive last year found that 88% of people who visit restaurants believe that restroom cleanliness reflects the restaurant's overall hygiene, including sanitary standards in the kitchen and prep areas.
But is that assumption correct -- or just a myth?
Health Department officials contacted about the survey said they couldn't say because they've never studied the subject -- and they wouldn't speculate.
Ben 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. 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.
Gross bathroom behavior at LAX
He went into a stall while continuing to eat his apple.I left.
Going poop in public -- Rocky Mountain Chocolate edition
Almost all the diapers were cloth; at least for the first two children. Then, after too many green apple splatters seeping through, migrated to the seemingly more absorbent disposable diaper.And then there were the emergency dumps that, well, we’ve all had, regardless of age. On Weeds last night, Nancy Botwin, played by Mary Louise Parker (right), peed into a cup while waiting to cross the Mexican-U.S. border.
Sometimes it’s not nearly that neat.
A reader told The Consumerist yesterday that,
"Last night we were out with friends and went to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory at Bella Terra/Huntington Beach. We were eating outside as my 5 year old daughter got an uncontrollable urge to use the bathroom and began crying and screaming 'diarrhea, diarrhea.' I ran into the store with her in my arms, begging to use the bathroom and they refused multiple times.
“I explained she had diarrhea and couldn't hold it and told them she was about to go on the floor. They refused again and never offered me any alternatives. I begged them to have a heart and that she was 5 but by that time she had lost it all over herself and me. I ran with her in my arms to the movie theater that let me use their bathroom. I cleaned her up, threw out some of her clothes and went back to the Chocolate Factory - asking for names and number of management. I again pleaded with them to use their heart in situations like this.”
Almost a year ago, a similar incident happened at a Jo-Ann Fabrics in Indiana. With similar results.
Today, California’s Orange County Register reported that officials with Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory issued an apology, and that the story sparked a backlash that led to death threats, according to store owner, Bonnie Overturf, who was not there during the incident last Thursday.
Overturf said her employees were following insurance policies for her store, and there were at least a dozen restrooms near the store the mother could have used.
Bryan Merryman, chief operating officer for the Colorado-based candy company, issued an apology to the mother Tuesday, saying "the actions of one franchised store's employees do not represent the values of the company … We truly regret this situation occurred."
"We are a very family friendly company and would never encourage any policy that does not take individual facts and circumstances into account,'' he wrote.Overturf, who said she apologized to the mother earlier, contacted police once death threats began and her home address was posted on an unknown Website. People also threatened to throw feces at her home, she said.
People shouldn’t throw piles of shit at store owners and their homes; or leave burning bags of poop on the front step. Poop is the source of many pathogens, stores are not all equipped to handle public poop, and some people don’t clean up after themselves (or pick up their dog’s shit).
But when kids (or others) gotta go, it’s better to isolate the mess to a bathroom.
I’ve cleaned up lots of shit. And expect lots more.
Time to survey toilets
It is calling on the Education Minister Jane Hutt to lift the “funding fog”, and also wants the Assembly Government to carry out an immediate survey of all school toilets.Sharon Mills, of Deri, near Bargoed, whose five-year-old son Mason died after contracting E. coli, said,
"We are living in the 21st century, yet many school toilets are like something from the dark ages."
Although it is believed the Deri Primary School pupil contracted the food poisoning bug through infected meat, many of the 150 people – most of them school children – who were struck down two years ago contracted the illness from people who were already infected. Promoting good handwashing habits is seen as one of the best ways of preventing disease.
But an inquiry by leading Welsh health experts found that a failure by many schools to provide basics such as warm water and soap for children to wash their hands after using the toilet encouraged the bug to spread.
Mother-of-two Pam Sacchi, of Bridgend, whose son Daniel, now 14, was hospitalised after contracting E.coli in 2005 when he was 12, said: “I still have parents coming up to me, complaining their children don’t have soap to wash their hands with in their school toilets. This should not be happening and something needs to be done. I realise there are sometimes funding shortfalls but the health of our children must come first.”
Proper handwashing begins with access to proper tools. That is why soap and paper towels are a necessary requirement for any public bathroom.
Florida restaurant fined for keeping bread in bathroom
Employees at the Checkers store on South French Avenue at West 15th Street apparently decided it was okay to store buns for their hamburgers inside a not-so-clean men's room.
Tuesday, it appeared they had changed the policy, but not before racking up a dozen health code violations.
Rating the toilets
Specifically, the toilet on the sidewalk of a busy Parisian street.And it looked exactly like this (left).
The N.Y. Times has stolen my idea for the cover story when I was appointed editor of the Ontarion, the University of Guelph student paper, in 1987, and decided to rate the local bathrooms as New York City unveiled its first coin-operated public toilet designed to be the high-tech equal of any of its counterparts in Paris, Singapore or other world-class cities.
(I went to local bars -- and it cost the paper thousands in lost advertising revenue cause they didn't like the results. This was before restaurant inspection disclosure.)
The story says that last week, two reporters, a man and a woman, visited six public toilets and, for comparison, two private ones, at a museum and a hotel.
Pennsylvania Station’s bathrooms are located in various companies’ waiting areas. The women’s room at New Jersey Transit was clean and every stall was working. Violins played over a loudspeaker.
The bathrooms in the main ticketing area at the Port Authority Bus Terminal are hard to find (there are no signs and the floor maps are difficult to decipher). There is debris on the floor. Signs warn that plainclothes police officers patrol the restrooms.
One sign details prohibited behavior, including smoking and drinking. It also warns that no one should “bathe, shave, launder, or change clothes.”
The main restrooms in the Egyptian Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are just past “Egypt Under Roman Rule 30 B.C. — 400 A.D.” and are clean and well lighted, if busy. A bathroom attendant visited twice in the space of 10 minutes.
The bathroom at the St. Regis Hotel in Midtown is just past the candle-lighted library and down the stairs. The lighting fixtures are crystal and the faucets polished brass. A red flowering plant smells sweet. No one else is there.
