2 weeks Ago By Jenna Price
I'm inventing a new word today. It applies to that captivating story about the catering company which allowed a to unleash. or signup to continue reading It poisoned 64 guests and sent four people to the emergency department.
The bug was norovirus - so many people read about this that the story went noro-viral. Sorry. The weird thing about the timing of the outbreak was that it was in 2022 when I thought we were still in peak handwashing time.
Turns out no. Our adherence to those incredible handwashing protocols we developed during COVID didn't last long. Just observe what goes on the next time you are at the basin in a public toilet.
It's more of a wave and flick. Remember when we booped out two lots of soap from the soap dispenser and then sang twice while we interlocked our fingers and scrubbed down to our wrists. Then we carefully towel dried our hands so we didn't open the bathroom door with wet hands and avoided the blow dryer like the plague.
One of the ways to avoid the plague is to avoid the aerosol droplets which comes from those air hand dryers. I bet you didn't know that hospitals don't have those blower things in clinical settings because health workers want to avoid killing us. No social distancing.
The woman behind me in the queue at the bakers was so close I thought she was trying to hump me. Endless handshaking from sweaty men. Folks have forgotten how to cough into their elbows.
As for supermarkets, remember the glory days when trolleys were wiped down on the reg. Sadly, gone are those days of care and concern for others. Gone.
It takes a pandemic to make us take hygiene seriously. Norovirus lives among us all the time - and it's a bastard of a thing. A friend tells me her grandkid was in a centre where seven out of 10 kids came down with gastro attributed to norovirus, the same bug which caused the outbreak I mentioned earlier.
The kids and the carers fell like dominoes. Two weeks after onset, some of the kids are still sick and they've passed it on to their parents and grandparents. Turns out that not only is it highly contagious - it doesn't give a shit if you've used hand sanitiser.
How do I know? At the beginning of COVID, when everyone was just getting into the whole handwashing thing, I called an expert. Yep, Sydney University nominated Ramon Shaban, a professor who specialised in infection prevention, as the one person who could tell me how to wash my hands. Professionally.
That's when he told me about what we needed to do - the whole COVID protocol of handwashing: palms, tops of hands, between the fingers, plenty of soap and water. Ideally, paper towels. Anyhow I rang him again this week to check in after the hideous norovirus news.
I asked Shaban how we fell off the handwashing bandwagon in this country. What he said scandalised me: "Compliance with basic hygiene measures such as hand hygiene has always been a problem in one form or another." And all those things we took for granted at the time, plenty of soap in public bathrooms, plenty of paper towels, hand sanitiser freely available, that's all dwindling to nothingness.
Back in the day, we thought it was a birthright. Or at least a health right. "This is not the first pandemic humanity has ever faced and there are multiple factors that influence hygiene habits," he says.
Sure, we probably have pandemic fatigue, especially the people in lengthy lockdowns. But there's also an unhealthy level of scepticism being used to undermine basic knowledge about what keeps people safe. Ohmigod, we could do with not having RFK jnr, the nutjob antivaxxer adjacent to the White House, the man who said autism "destroys" families; who said today's autistic children "will never pay taxes.
They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem.
They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." Why are Americans - not all Americans - so ridiculous? Let's hope it's not contagious in the way that norovirus is contagious.
"We need a whole-of-society remit to say we are going to do things differently," says Shaban. Regulation, knowledge, awareness. Behaviour change takes all that and more.
So, back to the kitchen where it all went terribly wrong. The by the federal Department of Health and Aged Care and the Australian Centre for Disease Control, says half the surveyed guests in 2022 had gastro symptoms. And this was not the first dunny rodeo for the unnamed firm.
It was also implicated in a foodborne norovirus outbreak in 2019. So, what went wrong? Handwashing sinks in the staff toilets were too small. There was no designated food preparation sink.
The walk-in freezer floor wasn't clean and needed replacing. There was potential for cross-contamination of food items in the freezer due to lack of organisation. But here's the problem which should give everyone the shits.
Staffing - no documented staff exclusion policy and inadequately maintained staff illness records. If your kid has norovirus, please keep away from preparing food for other people. Professor of health and social equity at Flinders University, James Smith, says there needs to be both individual and institutional accountability when it comes to adopting health-promoting behaviours.
"If you don't have the right infrastructure in place, that puts the population at risk." That small sink, part of kitchen infrastructure, sunk too many people. I don't know who this business is - but it shouldn't get a third chance.
In the meantime, to your own sinks, immediately. Sing twice. And don't forget your wrists.
Jenna Price is a Canberra Times columnist and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University. Jenna Price is a Canberra Times columnist and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University. Daily Today's top stories curated by our news team.
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