Dirty Ice - SOOOOOOO??!?!

Bacteria discovered in fast food restaurant ice. SOOOOOOO!???

I ignored this the first time I skimmed past it during my morning RSS catch-up. Then I got it from jericho @ attrition as a mailing list blast.

The science of the experiment as performed has no control groups, irresponsibly fails to come to any actual conclusions and is misleading. This won a school science fair and is moving on to the Regional Science and Engineering Fair?

The two paragraphs the article article devotes to a voice of reason:

Geoff Luebkemann, director of the division for hotels and restaurants at the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, said people shouldn’t swear off fast food ice just yet. His state agency regulates Florida businesses, including coordinating health inspections.

Ice machines are part of the health inspections," Luebkemann said. “There are a lot of factors that have to be considered, like how accurately did she gather and test her specimens. Plus, comparing the ice to toilet water can be misleading because there are acceptable levels of bacteria for water.”

We later get some nice fear mongering from the VP OF A LAB THAT WANTS PEOPLE TO WANT THEIR WATER TESTED…

Galina Tuninskaya, vice president of Applied Consumer Services, a private lab that tests drinking water, said the standard for drinking water is usually 100 colony-forming units of bacteria per milliliter. The highest amount Jasmine found was 54 units in ice from a self-serve machine.

Tuninskaya said the acceptable level varies for each type of bacteria.

“No levels of fecal coliform or E. coli are acceptable,” she said. “If you find that, you’ve got a problem.”

And we are helpfully left with a 12 year old child’s conclusion:

As for Jasmine, she has changed her ordering habits.

“No way,” she said. “After this, I definitely don’t get ice.”

Brilliant! For her next trick, our scientist in training should perform the same test on the food from the same restaurants. Once she goes public with the news that people that handle food occasionally fail to wash their hands before hand and that all food at some time is handled (if only sometimes by the person consuming it) we’ll all swear off eating altogether and get IV’s injecting manufactured proteins that have been filtered and pasteurized sufficiently to protect us from the dirty scary world of bacterium!

I’m not disappointed that a child performed less than perfect science, I’m annoyed in the presentation, the applause, and the gullibility of the surrounding adults.