Text size:

State food reports go online

But eatery safety information is sparse and not up to date.

By Christopher Schnaars | and Tim Darragh Of The Morning Call

January 14, 2006

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture has made good on a promise to put food-safety inspection reports for restaurants, school cafeterias, day-care centers and other food establishments on the Internet.

Sort of.

The new system includes inspections conducted since mid-December, but is not current because it is still being debugged. Users can search by county, ZIP code and the name of the establishment.

But when a user clicks on a link for a specific inspection, the only information provided is the date of the inspection and whether the establishment is in compliance with the Pennsylvania Food Code and the Food Employee Certification Law. As of late Friday afternoon, all 163 records in the state database showed establishments in compliance.

The Web reports are the first visible improvements in the Agriculture Department's food establishment program since The Morning Call last year found systemic

failures throughout it. The state auditor general later blasted the department — which is responsible for inspecting 47,000 food establishments statewide — for putting the public's health at risk, and urged it to give consumers its inspection findings via the Web.

As it is now, but the system provides no information about what violations the inspector found or the inspector's written comments.

That information is housed in the database used for the Web site but won't be made available, if at all, for months, said Bobby McLean, director of the Food Safety and Laboratory Services bureau.

State officials do not want to provide more details about a particular inspection until inspectors have had time to inspect more food establishments, spokesman Chris L. Ryder said. Providing the information now could cause someone to avoid a restaurant that has been inspected and dine at a restaurant that isn't in the database because it has not been inspected this year, he said.

The Web site may change in appearance and presentation once the Agriculture Department decides what information should be made public.

McLean said officials are considering either leaving the report as it appears now, presenting a more detailed report with comparative information from similar establishments, or simply listing all of the information as the inspectors record it.

The state site can be accessed at http://www.agriculture.state.pa.us , then by clicking ''Online services.'' Then search through ''Food Safety Inspection Results.''

Public health experts applauded the move to the Web.

Margaret Potter, director of the Center for Public Health Practice at the University of Pittsburgh, said Pennsylvania consumers are entitled to the information, and that when businesses are aware that the public is looking at their inspections, they will put more effort into maintaining clean, safe facilities.

''It's sort of the sunshine effect,'' she said.

And Marla Gold, dean of the School of Public Health at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said she favors a system that gives the public a simple way to understand if an establishment is in compliance. That serves the dual purposes of giving consumers useful information and encouraging operators to keep their kitchens clean, Gold said.

Meanwhile, the state is hoping to secure a federal grant that will allow at least some of the approximately 200 communities statewide that do their own inspections to piggyback on the Agriculture Department's system, McLean said. Locally, Bucks and Montgomery counties, Allentown and Bethlehem, and two dozen mostly small boroughs in the region do their own inspections.

Also as a result of the auditor general's report, Agriculture Department officials plan to strengthen inspections by seeking updates for Act 369, the state's aged law regulating inspections.

The Morning Call's investigation found that many of the places under state control went years without seeing an inspector. As part of its investigation, The Morning Call also created a database of 200,000 inspection reports statewide. That database remains available at http://www.mcall.com/foodsafety , and the newspaper is adding all inspection reports through December.

timothy.darragh@mcall.com

610-778-2259

christopher.schnaars@

mcall.com

610-820-6770