MARTIN SLOANE | Supermarket Shopper Clean carts can save lives

Even if a shopping cart handle looks clean it may be laden with germs that can sicken you or your child. In last week's column, I told of a 2-year-old girl, "C," who contracted the often-fatal disease, Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS), caused by the E. coli 0157:H7 virus. She spent several weeks in a hospital intensive care unit with her life hanging in the balance. After eliminating other possible causes, C's parents concluded that her ride in a supermarket shopping cart exposed her to the disease.
Are they right? The evidence is refutable. C's parents could not go back to the supermarket and find that shopping cart. However, there's been proof that nasty and dangerous bacteria can find their way to a shopping cart and to the shoppers who then touch it.
How it happens
Where does the bacteria come from? In a study sponsored by the Maryland Agricultural Experimental Station, researchers from the Department of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Maryland sampled 825 packages of raw meat obtained from 59 supermarkets in the Greater Washington, D.C., area between June 1999 and July 2000. The meat in 179 of the packages sampled contained E. coli bacteria (82 from chicken, 40 from beef, 34 from pork and 23 from turkey). In addition, 159 of the samples contained campylobacter, and 25 contained salmonella.
The Maryland study concluded: "Retail raw meats are often contaminated with food-borne pathogens. They are potential vehicles for transmitting food-borne diseases, and our findings stress the need for increased implementation of hazard analysis."
What are the chances a cart handle will be contaminated? In 1998, Dr. Kelly Reynolds, a microbiologist, at the University of Arizona, doing research to determine why certain bacteria find their way into people's homes, visited six Tucson, Ariz., supermarkets. "I decided to pay special attention to contact points that were frequently touched by shoppers but rarely, if ever, cleaned," says Reynolds. "When we asked supermarkets how frequently shopping carts were cleaned, the answer often was, almost never."
Tests
At each of the Tucson supermarkets, Reynolds and her team chose carts at random, and a 2-inch-square area on each shopping cart handle was swabbed with a solution that would pick up any fluids that were on the handles. At the laboratory, Reynolds made a startling discovery: One in five carts tested positive for bodily fluids -- blood, mucus, saliva or urine -- that could transmit infectious germs.
In speaking with Reynolds, she pointed out that shoppers typically touch many trays of fresh meat or poultry in making their selections. Blood may be clearly visible inside the packages, but these same fluids on the outside of the trays are often difficult for shoppers to detect. Reynolds says shoppers touch the trays, then touch the cart. The germs can remain on the cart's surfaces for hours or even days.
"I don't want to alarm shoppers, but they should be warned," says Reynolds. "Raw meat and poultry can carry serious pathogens like E. coli. They can kill a child or an elderly person whose immune system is undeveloped or weakened."
Touching what feels like a damp tray of meat or poultry may transfer something very dangerous to the handle of your shopping cart. But leaky meat trays are not the only way supermarket shopping carts become contaminated.
One of most shocking reports of soiled shopping carts comes from TV station KRON-4 in San Francisco. Last year, in a special investigation, reporter Linda Yee went to the Department of Public Works and watched workers wearing biohazard suits remove trash and human waste from shopping carts collected on the streets.
KRON-4 randomly selected and tested several of these carts and found that half of them tested positive for fecal coliform, the bacteria derived from human excrement, as well as fecal strep and E. coli. When these carts were returned to the supermarkets, they were immediately put back in service without being cleaned, Yee discovered. In KRON-4's follow-up story this past November, some supermarkets were still rolling recovered carts back into service without being sanitized.
Industry response
The supermarket industry, with very few exceptions, has buried its head in the sand claiming there is no problem. Responding to my inquiry, Giant Food, Inc., one of the four chains whose meats were sampled in the Maryland study, said it considers the risk of organisms residing on shopping cart handles to be very low, but acknowledged it has never tested for them. Other major chains including A & amp;P, Safeway and Albertsons, refused to respond to my inquiries.
For the last three years, a cart sanitizing system has been offered by Louisville, Ky.-based Freshcart LLC (formerly Sani-Dryer). It resembles a mini-car wash. At a cost to the supermarket of a few cents a cart, it can provide every shopper with a 99.9 percent germ-free cart. Only two supermarkets have thought enough of their customers to test it. I believe it all comes down to supermarkets not wanting to spend the money. It is a sad commentary that an industry, which goes out of its way to reassure customers concerning food safety, won't spend a nickel to give them a germ-free shopping cart.
Clean carts can save lives, and they can also prevent illnesses. It is high time supermarkets wake up and shoulder their responsibility to their customers. To ignore the danger is gross negligence. I believe it. What do you think? Write to me, Martin Sloane, The Supermarket Shopper, in care of The Vindicator. I will publish the most interesting letters. If you share my concern, you can send this column to your supermarket and ask it to wake up now and take action. You can find the first column "The Problem With Dirty Supermarket Carts" on my Web site: www.martinsloane.com.
XSend questions and comments to Martin Sloane in care of The Vindicator. The volume of mail precludes individual replies to every letter, but Martin Sloane will respond to letters of general interest in the column. Check out Martin Sloane's Web site at www.martinsloane.com.
United Feature Syndicate