Hygiene Lack In Restaurants

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30677, 17 February 1965, Page 3

Hygiene Lack In Restaurants

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, February 16. Improvement of the present standards in food premises is advocated in a nation-wide Health Department survey which is now nearing completion. In its annual report last year the Health Department said there were 435 notified cases of food poisoning.

Mr T. W. Adams, Chief Inspector of Health, said today that until figures were analysed at the end of the survey a true picture of food hygiene standards in New Zealand would not be known.

There was every indication that they were not satisfactory.

Mr Adams said food hygiene standards in Wellington were comparable to those in the rest of the country. The Health Department has only been partially successful in trying to counter the gradual lowering food sanitation in most health districts.

Last year the department embarked on a full-scale national programme for improvement and initiated a new system for supervision of hotels, restaurants and all other food premises, and for the uniform enforcement of enactments regulating the conduct of such premises.

Evaluation of the survey being undertaken is by no means of a new scoring method.

The survey, which will have taken approximately a year by the time it is finished, involves nearly 20,000 premises.

More Killed.—Twenty-three people were killed and 310 injured on Auckland roads in the first six weeks of this year, compared with five killed and 230 injured in 1964. The area covers from Wellsford to Mercer.—(P.A.)