A Little Prevention Goes A Long Way

Customers place considerable faith in restaurants.

They expect good food for a fair price, good service and, in many cases, good atmosphere. They don’t expect to be standing in line two weeks later to receive a globulin shot to protect them from contracting hepatitis A, a liver disease.

That leaves a bad aftertaste - and restaurant owners fumbling to explain to customers how they were exposed to the virus. This fall, three area restaurant owners have battled the bad publicity that comes with hepatitis A. The explanations don’t come easily.

A contaminated food handler occasionally can be found even in the cleanest restaurants. Owners can’t monitor employees every minute to see that they’re following cleanliness guidelines.

But restaurateurs can take steps to reduce the chances they’ll see their names in tomorrow’s paper. They can stress to workers the importance of a small matter like washing their hands after using the restroom and, most importantly, pay to immunize them against the disease.

To their credit, a number of Spokane area restaurants are beginning to do just that.

The Shari’s chain, for example, won an award from the Panhandle Health District after deciding to provide shots to employees at all three of its Spokane restaurants and the one in Coeur d’Alene. This, at noticeable expense. The two immunization shots cost $42 apiece and are administered six months apart. In an industry with high turnover, like the restaurant business, there’s no guarantee that a new employee will be around in six months for the second shot.

In fact, the local restaurant industry is taking these steps even though little of the current outbreak can be traced back to area restaurants - and the potential for being infected through a secondary source is small.

Commendably, the industry wants to remove even that small risk - as well as the possibility that the Spokane Regional Health District might declare a state of emergency.

“The response has been wonderful,” Dr. Kim Thorburn, district health officer said Tuesday. “I don’t feel we’ll have to invoke our mandatory powers. That’s not to say we don’t have a public health emergency.”

Sometimes good things come from emergencies.

If hepatitis A vaccinations become routine among local food handlers as a result of the current outbreak, both consumers and restaurants will be better off.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = D.F. Oliveria For the editorial board