Metro's Oregon Zoo has opened an exciting new set of exhibits at select locations around the site. The World of Microbes is an innovative and immersive series offering guests an unprecedented zoo experience, incorporating real-world interactions with live, wild viral and bacterial representatives from this often hidden world. Best of all, there's no additional charge!
The number of people acknowledged to have been sickened via restaurant and catering operations at Metro's Oregon Zoo appears to have topped out at 135. The outbreak has been attributed to food contaminated with norovirus, which is associated with human fecal material.
And although food vendors are generally required to submit to health inspections every few months, the folks over at Willamette Week uncovered a curious set of facts: government agencies are exempt. This makes perfect sense, as it's an established truth that government employees are significantly more responsible than are run-of-the-mill citizens; moreover, government workers never make mistakes.
Therefore, food preparation and distribution at the zoo's two main restaurant locations have not been inspected once during the past six years. Auxillary sites, such as the "elephant ears" food cart, concert and other special events food carts, and locations such as "cafe" connected to the notoriously cockroach-infested primate building may in fact never have been subjected to health inspection.
Highly-compensated head Metro mouthpiece Jim Middaugh's all over it; claiming first that health inspectors have always been welcome at Metro facilities (a claim denied by the environmental health supervisor for Multnomah County) and then that zoo employees perform daily inspections and are very conscientious, blah, blah.
“The zoo maintains and enforces safe food-handling practices,” Middaugh says. “Zoo management will continue to reinforce and insist on those practices with all food-handling staff.”
As of two years ago, Middaugh received $155,371.53 in taxpayer-paid compensation for doing the incredibly difficult job of writing press releases and occasionally speaking to members of the press, and so he really needs to be on top of the issue, given the way that the zoo's own highly-compensated head mouthpiece blew the whole recent furor generated by questions of ownership of the elephant calf born there last month.
In any case, it's good to know that things are all hunky-dory at the zoo now:
Zoo officials say two restaurants, Cascade Grill and AfriCafe, and the zoo’s food preparation areas were later sanitized.
Curiously, the "zoo officials" don't mention the "Bearwalk Cafe" (the location noted previously as directly attached to the primate building), nor does it mention the location situated in the Africa Rainforest area, nor does it mention any of their portable food carts. Presumably, none of these food handlers or the units themselves are deemed capable of spreading any particular contaminant.
