EHS-Net Partners - San Mateo County

The County of San Mateo Health Department is an EHS-Net practice partner. The County of San Mateo EHS-Net program is working on a food practice project in FY 2010-2015.

Improve Restaurant Chicken Handling Practices

This project focused on improving restaurants’ raw chicken handling practices to help reduce the county’s high Campylobacter infection rates. San Mateo staff developed training kits to help restaurant operators train employees on safe handling of raw chicken. They provided these kits to 500 restaurants. San Mateo staff also assessed restaurant chicken handling practices in restaurants that did and did not receive these training kits. They assessed these practices both before and after the kits were provided.

Restaurants that received the training kits showed increased use of thermometers to verify chicken cooking temperatures, compared to restaurants that did not receive the training kits.

For this project, San Mateo developed training materials to help restaurant operators train employees on safe handling of raw chicken.

San Mateo also conducted interviews with people who got sick with Campylobacter infection [PDF - 191 KB] to learn more about who is affected and why.

A paper summarizing the project’s methods and results can be found here: http://www.smchealth.org/sites/default/files/docs/EHS/Campy_RawChickenHandlingStudy.pdf [PDF - 143 KB]