EHS-Net Partners - Minnesota

The Minnesota Department of Health is an EHS-Net research partner. The Minnesota EHS-Net program is working on two research projects in FY 2010-2015.

Food Safety Practices in Sushi Restaurants

This project will determine the frequency with which foodborne illness risk factors are present in Minnesota restaurants that prepare and serve raw fish. Minnesota staff will interview kitchen managers and observe food workers. This will determine the extent to which all restaurants in Minnesota that prepare and serve raw fish

• Obtain raw fish products from approved sources and ensure the products come with a letter of guarantee from the supplier.
• Have procedures to ensure that parasites in raw fish are destroyed.
• Have procedures to ensure that food safety time and temperature requirements for fish served raw are met.
• Handle acidified rice appropriately.
• Practice adequate hand hygiene and use adequate equipment.

A paper summarizing the project, Restaurant Policies and Practices for Serving Raw Fish in Minnesota Restaurants, was published in 2016.

Household Well Water Quality

The Minnesota Department of Health is working on a project related to private well water. They are looking at links between private well water and enteric illnesses such as Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. This project is nine southeastern Minnesota counties with high cattle density and karst topography.

Minnesota is also leading completion of a paper that documents findings from the EHS-Net project titled Improving Waterborne Disease Outbreak Investigation Reporting—A Review of Outbreak Reporting in Three States. In that project, EHS-Net looked at the history of waterborne disease outbreaks to find ways to protect communities from these outbreaks in the future.