Uncovering the hidden health hazards at restaurants

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via The Patriot Ledger Dining RSS by Nancy Reardon on 9/29/08

Raw meat lying on top of breads, moldy refrigerators, dirty cutting boards, leaking kitchen ceilings and back doors that don’t close, welcoming rodents. These are some of the health code violations found at South Shore restaurants in recent months that consumers may never know about.

That’s because it’s not easy to get your hands on health inspection reports, and it is even harder to get them quickly.

After calling and visiting six local health departments, The Patriot Ledger found it can take up to several days to find out whether a local restaurant is sanitary or not.

And, once obtained, many of those handwritten reports are barely legible, covered in abbreviated notes and cross-outs.

Help is on the way in the form of a new state database of restaurant inspections, but it will take three years to make it fully operational, said Suzanne Condon, director of food safety in the state Office of Environmental Health.

The actual inspection reports include a one-page checklist that say whether surfaces and equipment are clean, the food is fresh and employees follow proper hygiene practices. A second page provides descriptions of each violation and whether it was corrected.

In larger cities like Boston, Somerville and Cambridge, these reports – and a restaurant’s recent inspection history – are available online.

But on the South Shore, health directors say they barely have enough staff to keep up with the inspections and paperwork, let alone get them online – and they cannot afford the technology.

Most communities have only one or two full-time inspectors. Even Quincy, with more than 500 food establishments, has two inspectors.

For now, they are only able to meet the state’s public records law requirements: Provide a written request and they’ll get back to you within 10 days.

A Ledger reporter acting as an ordinary citizen could get verbal inspection results over the phone from only one of six communities where information was requested.

In Hingham, health director Bruce Catman read the requested report and answered questions about it. However, when the reporter came to the office two days later for a copy, it wasn’t ready for several days.

In Marshfield, the reporter was told over the phone that a verbally requested report would be ready for pickup the next day. But two days later, it wasn’t ready. The office secretary, Cathy Duddi, asked for a written request and noted she had 10 days to respond but called within a few hours to say it was ready.

And in Plymouth, two health office employees did not know whether an inspection report could be copied. They called director Susan Merrifield to learn that it could, and then provided it right away. Merrifield later said she addressed the confusion and that a conference room is also available for consumers to review records at any time.

Some health office staff appeared surprised when asked for a copy of an inspection report. In fact, local health directors say consumers hardly ever make those requests.

“I would say it’s very rare,” said Richard Marino, health director in Weymouth. “I think for most people, it’s like a big yawn. ... People have a realistic expectation that if the place is open, it is safe to eat in there.”

And in Hingham, health director Peter Falabella said, “I don’t think most people in their busy day-to-day lives think of calling the board of health.”

By contrast, Boston’s online database gets up to 200 hits a day, said Nancy Lo, a project manager who helped set it up.

“People check out the site before they’re going to dine that evening,” Lo said. “If you’re going to spend a couple hundred dollars at a restaurant, you want to know if it was closed last week for sanitary violations.”

Randolph Health Director John McVeigh said he started to receive more calls from residents with questions and complaints once he started posting a list of restaurants with critical violations on the Web two years ago.

“I think we want to educate people as much as possible,” he said. “People are in general more knowledgeable about food issues with the advent of the Internet, and they’re more aware when they go out to eat.”