The California-based burger chain plans to ban face masks on employees in five of the seven states in which it operates, citing the importance of staff "smiles" for customers.
Not OP but I too wanted to know a source so I did a search on this cool new website I invented with Al Gore called https://google.fu and found this from Smithsonian Magazine:
The study examined 800 foodborne illness outbreaks reported by 25 state and local health departments between 2017 and 2019. Of the roughly 500 outbreaks linked to at least one known contributing factor, 205 of them, or 41 percent, involved ill workers.Jun 2, 202
/s about inventing that with Al Gore. It was actually Tom Landry.
Correlation, not causation. Is my food poisoning orally contagious? A sick employee may care a lot less about the quality of food they're preparing, causing more people to get sick from rotten food on average. There are too many variables to even consider in this.
What do you base that off of? Most food poisoning is due to bad storage of food resulting in bacterial toxins even after it's cooked. Only Norovirus has an oral route that I can think of (and that's usually based around projectile vomiting that then ends up on hands).
? That just says salmonella and norovirus and encourages hand hygiene. Masks wouldn't help there. To be clear, I want safe food handling, I'm just also a nurse and prefer reasonable approaches over theater. Foodborn illness generally doesn't benefit from droplet projections.
What's unreasonable about someone else choosing to wear a mask when they're sick? Even if it's not causing foodborne illnesses, it's still spreading the illness to other staff and customers.
This "made up statistic" is the "unreasonable approach to safe food handling" that you referred to earlier? That doesn't make sense as statistics are data not actions to follow when handling food.
Are you arguing that a stranger freely deciding to wear a mask when they're sick is too unreasonable in your eyes and should be banned? That's ridiculous.
No, I am not arguing that and I don't particularly know why you think I am since I never indicated it. I objected to the idea that masks would prevent half of food borne illnesses, when they would likely prevent none. If you base your actions off of something as ridiculous as that, you are not taking a reasonable approach to safe food handling.
If you think you're arguing with an anti masker, you're not. Like I said, I'm a nurse and provided direct patient care to people dying from COVID.
Yeah parent poster added the masks into the comment, but the study did not mention them, but as the study says, the improper hand hygiene is responsible for large number of food poisonings.
Why the study doesn't talk about masks? Likely because it was done before pandemic so no one wore masks in that setting. Second thing is that generally they are concerned about serious diseases and if somebody would report catching a cold from eating at restaurant will simply be ignored. People are also less likely to report because it's harder to be sure where cold came from.
Though if diseases transferred via dirty hands caused 41% of outbreaks, then I believe it's safe to say that air borne disease is more likely to transfer that way, it's just a kind of diseases that no one cared about until we had covid, and only in 2020.