Taste and Safety: Is the Exceptional Cuisine Offered by High End Restaurants Paralleled by High Standards of Food Safety?

DISCUSSION The Top 50 restaurants in England were more likely to have had reported outbreaks from 2000-2014 than other food premises, and there was a trend for higher rated position among the Top 50 to be associated with higher probability of reported outbreaks, although the latter findings were non-significant at the 5% level. Limitations of this study which should be considered when interpreting these findings. Detected and reported outbreaks were the measure of food safety accessible to us across both the Top 50 restaurants and other registered food premises in England. Analyses identifying a 39 fold higher rate of reported outbreaks among Top 50 premises compared to other food premises and of higher position being associated with increased odds of an identified outbreak could each have been prone to bias in either direction. For example, if food premises within or further up the list in the Top 50 had a higher profile, and higher expectation from diners not to get sick, reporting and detection might be more likely. This could create an apparent positive association between high ranking and the occurrence of outbreaks. In contrast, if more prestigious restaurants use internal measures to respond to incidents without informing public health authorities3,4 unless very large or persistent outbreaks occur this could create a bias in the opposite direction. It is not clear whether systematic biases affect reporting of locally identified outbreaks to the national reporting sys...
Source: PLOS Currents Outbreaks - Category: Epidemiology Authors: Source Type: research