Outsmart the Transmission of Norovirus with a New Foodservice Tool Registration

Duration:60 minutes

Up to 60% of all illnesses and outbreaks each year in restaurants can be traced to norovirus. Ignoring the potential for a norovirus outbreak can be costly in addition to the harm it causes customers and the residual damage to a restaurant’s reputation. Norovirus is a particularly serious threat because it’s difficult to kill, persistent- surviving on surfaces for weeks, and is highly contagious, even in very small amounts. The restaurant environment has a number of transmission points on surfaces where the virus can be found better known as “hot spots”.

These hot spots are where employees can transmit the virus, and then to kitchen surfaces and foods simply through touch. The most common transmission points are also more likely contaminated with virus when employees work sick, customers/employees get sick in the restaurant, and when there is a community associated outbreak of norovirus. This webinar will show how to use sanitation of these hot spots to reduce the risk of norovirus transmission in a restaurant.

Attendees will learn how to:

Identify the steps to keep norovirus out of your restaurants and out of your foods
Identify the norovirus hot spots in a restaurant that are most likely to be involved in the transmission of the virus and how to eliminate them
Define the conditions that require the escalation of hot spot for immediate sanitation in restaurants to reduce the risk of transmission of the virus

Speakers

Christopher King

Managing Partner

Public Health Innovations LLc

Dr. Hal King is Managing Partner at Active Food Safety, a Advisory Services and Digital Products company, and Founder/CEO of Public Health Innovations, a public health strategy and design company. Dr. King is also an Associate Professor of Public Health at the University of Georgia College of Public Health. Dr. King is a public health professional who has worked in the investigation of respiratory and foodborne and other disease outbreaks (at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U. S. Public Health Service), performed federally funded research on the causation and prevention of infectious diseases (at Emory University School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases), and worked in the prevention of intentional adulteration of foods and food defense in the United States and for Army force health (with the U.S. Army Reserves Consequence Management Unit, 20th CBRNE Command). Dr. King is formally the Director of Food and Product Safety at Chick-fil-A Inc. (a national restaurant chain with then over 2,000 restaurants and $10 billion in annual sales) where he designed and led Chick-fil-A’s Food Safety Management Program for 11 years; the topic of his first book, Food Safety Management: Implementing a Food Safety Program in a Food Retail Business (Springer). Dr. King’s second book, co-authored with Dr. Wendy Bedale, Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls (Academic Press) shows how the foodservice industry can leverage the FDA requirements of human food manufacturers to ensure safe source of foods in their supply chain. Dr. King’s latest book, Food Safety Management Systems, was published in 2020 as part of the IAFP Food Microbiology Series by Springer; this book shows the foodservice industry how they can implement Process HACCP-based management systems in their foodservice locations to prevent foodborne disease illnesses and outbreaks. Dr. King is also the co-author and author of several articles and book chapters on public health interventions, holds several U.S. Patents and Patent Pending technologies, Copyrights and Trademarks, and has helped the food industry via development of new products and services. Dr. King is the recipient of the 2018 NSF International Food Safety Leadership and Innovation Award.

(Moderator) Barbara VanRenterghem, Ph.D.

Editorial Director

Food Safety Magazine

Barbara VanRenterghem, Ph.D., is the editorial director of Food Safety Magazine, a position she has held since 2008. From 2005–2008, she was the chief editor of Controlled Environments Magazine and the science editor of Animal Lab News and Lab Manager Magazine at Vicon Publishing. At Eaton Publishing (1999–2005), she rose from the positions of assistant scientific editor for BioTechniques and acquisitions editor for BioTechniques Press to the editor of content development and acquisitions and director of commercial product development. While at Eaton (then acquired by Informa), she served as the chief editor of Preclinica. She received a B.Sc. in biology in 1989 from Bowling Green State University and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology in 1994 from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.