A former employee of a cafe in an Australian state has been awarded more than US$65,000 ($42,500) after contracting Salmonella.
The pronunciation of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) relates to an incident in 2017 when the 15-year-old was working at Central Café in Gungahlin.
The employee, who worked in the kitchen in early 2017, was admitted to hospital with Salmonella Typhimurium in February.
In February 2017, five customers and a waitress at the café contracted Salmonella after eating there. They became unwell after eating different types of food on different days.
ACT Health was reported sick and conducted an inspection. The cafe was found to have committed numerous breaches of the Food Act 2001 and was closed before being allowed to reopen in March 2017.
A sample of frozen cooked chicken taken during the inspection contained Salmonella Typhimurium, the same type of bacteria that every sick customer contracted.
Duty of care breached
The court also heard from Yaman Kasirga, who took over as owner of the cafe in December 2016, an ACT Health food inspector, two people infected with Salmonella after eating at the cafe, and several medical experts.
The employee’s main job was to prepare food, mainly meats, for the chef to cook. She did not wear gloves when handling food.
Photos showed the cafe was not clean, and the ruling said the cafe was not unlucky enough to be inspected on a day off. An inspection revealed that there were no soap or paper towels in the dispensers and no hand sanitizer available; the cold room and other refrigerators were not temperature controlled, and fresh chicken in the cold room was stored at 9.5 degrees C (49.1 degrees F), which is not in accordance with the requirements of the Food Standards Code.
In 2018, Kasirga was prosecuted for selling unsafe food, failing to comply with the Food Standards Code and failing to renew business registration. He was fined $4,500 (US$2,900).
In the present case, it was considered unlikely that the worker had contracted Salmonella from food she ate in the cafe, but likely from meat processed during her work.
According to court documents, the only thermometer in the cafe was still unopened in its packaging. This means that the café had no way of knowing that the cold room was not properly cooling the food inside.
Although the court found that the defendant was liable in negligence because the plaintiff had contracted Salmonella, it did not accept that the defendant was as ill as alleged or that the sustained injuries were as serious as alleged, so that the damages awarded were less than sought.
(To sign up for a free subscription to Food Safety News, click here.)