Dining outside of the home can be difficult for persons with food allergies who must rely on restaurant staff to properly prepare allergen-free meals. The purpose of this study was to understand and identify factors associated with food allergy knowledge and attitudes among restaurant managers, food workers, and servers. This study was conducted by the Environmental Health Specialists Network (EHS-Net), a collaborative forum of federal, state, and local environmental health specialists working to understand the environmental factors associated with food safety issues. EHS-Net personnel collected data from 278 randomly selected restaurants through interviews with restaurant managers, food workers, and servers. Results indicated that managers, food workers, and servers were generally knowledgeable and had positive attitudes about accommodating customers’ food allergies. However, we identified important gaps, such as more than 10% of managers and staff believed that a person with a food allergy can safely consume a small amount of that allergen. Managers and staff also had lower confidence in their restaurant’s ability to properly respond to a food allergy emergency. The knowledge and attitudes of all groups were higher at restaurants that had a specific person to answer food allergy questions and requests or a plan for answering questions from food allergic customers. However, food allergy training was not associated with knowledge in any of the groups but was associated with manager and server attitudes. Based on these findings, we encourage restaurants to be proactive by training staff about food allergies and creating plans and procedures to reduce the risk of a customer having a food allergic reaction.

The effectiveness of flour fortification in reducing anaemia prevalence is equivocal. The goal was to utilise the existing national-level data to assess whether anaemia in non-pregnant women was reduced after countries began fortifying wheat flour, alone or in combination with maize flour, with at least Fe, folic acid, vitamin A or vitamin B 12 . Nationally representative anaemia data were identified through Demographic and Health Survey reports, the WHO Vitamin and Mineral Nutrition Information System database and other national-level nutrition surveys. Countries with at least two anaemia surveys were considered for inclusion. Within countries, surveys were excluded if altitude was not consistently adjusted for, or if the blood-draw site (e.g. capillary or venous) or Hb quantification method (e.g. HemoCue or Cyanmethaemoglobin) differed. Anaemia prevalence was modelled for countries that had pre-and post-fortification data (n 12) and for countries that never fortified flour (n 20) using logistic regression models that controlled for time effects, human development index (HDI) and endemic malaria. After adjusting for HDI and malaria, each year of fortification was associated with a 2·4 % reduction in the odds of anaemia prevalence (PR 0·976, 95 % CI 0·975, 0·978). Among countries that never fortified, no reduction in the odds of anaemia prevalence over time was observed (PR 0·999, 95 % CI 0·997, 1·002). Among both fortification and non-fortification countries, HDI and malaria were significantly associated with anaemia (P, 0·001). Although this type of evidence precludes a definitive conclusion, results suggest that after controlling for time effects, HDI and endemic malaria, anaemia prevalence has decreased significantly in countries that fortify flour with micronutrients, while remaining unchanged in countries that do not.

In November 2014, the Rhode Island Department of Health investigated a cluster of 3 listeriosis cases. Using whole-genome sequencing to support epidemiologic, laboratory, and environmental investigations, the department identified 1 restaurant as the likely source of the outbreak and also linked the establishment to a listeriosis case that occurred in 2013.