THE Bulawayo City Council (BCC) has condemned some major food outlets in the city, including Chicken Inn and Pizza Inn outlets and a number of butcheries and has given them warnings to improve their hygienic levels or face closure.
The local authority carries out routine spot checks on restaurants, butcheries and all facilities that deal with food to ensure adherence to by-laws and that they do not expose the public to health hazards. According to the latest council report four restaurants, three food factories and six butcheries were condemned and warned to improve their hygiene.
The condemnations came out after BCC put up a programme targeting food premises in the Central Business District for compliance where health and hygiene education was also given to food handlers during inspections.
The affected outlets are; Pizza Inn (Jason Moyo branch), Chicken Inn (Jason Moyo branch), Eastern Delights Takeaways, Fish and Chip King Takeaways (9th Avenue), Mr Chips Takeaways (Fife Street branch), Mumsie”s Kitchen Restaurant, Sunrise Meats (Pelandaba), Zimbabwe Cash Butchery (Pelandaba), Oceans Foods Butchery (Pelandaba), Ramcode Butchery (Pelandaba) and Matabele Meat Market (Nkulumane), which all recorded a grading of C. Creamy Inn (Jason Moyo branch) and Snappy’s Butchery both recording a grading of C minus.
“The results were shared with the area environmental health officers who were assisting the premises to maintain hygiene status. Grade C indicates that the standard of hygiene in most of the food outlets was unsatisfactory.
Environmental health officers were to intensify inspections and health education to prevent food-related illnesses,” reads the report.
During the exercise the local authority’s health inspectorate department condemned seven, one litre soft drinks and 44, 500 millimetre soft drinks which had expired but were displayed at various supermarkets for sale.
An uninspected beef carcass and head were also condemned from a butchery in the CBD. Clarifying on the move, BCC director of health services Dr Edwin Sibanda said this was the first step they take, with the institution required to adhere to laid down hygiene procedures or risk being closed down when found to be retaining unsatisfactory results.
“What we usually do is we take swabs from people’s hands, sometimes going up to the rectum, from the facilities’ surfaces even utensils, which we send to our labs. If the results come out unsatisfactory, we go back after a period and re-swab, advice and teach the affected institution to guide them such that they move away from the unsatisfactory level.
We continue monitoring them but if we note that there is no improvement, then we are forced to invoke some of our by-laws which may allow us to even close the place temporarily or for a long time,” said Dr Sibanda.
He said the move was not necessarily meant to shut down the premises but just to protect the general public from being exposed to health hazards.
-State Media