Lake County Health department launches online food safety courses

What's the ideal temperature for storing food in the refrigerator?

How long should you wash your hands before preparing a meal?

They may seem like simple questions, but health officials say people commonly ignore the basic rules of food safety.

The Lake County Health Department now offers free Web-based food safety courses to increase public awareness of food safety practices and reduce the risk of food-borne illnesses.

A roughly 30-minute online tutorial offers a crash course on the basics of food safety, preparation, proper food handling and storage practices. Participants are quizzed on general food safety knowledge before taking the course.

The course includes five lessons: introduction to food safety; hand washing; food safety hazards; time and temperature control; and cleaning. Each lesson is followed by a quiz at the end to reinforce information learned from the tutorial. Tests are not timed.

"We tried to keep it really simple," said Larry Mackey, Lake County Health Department food program coordinator. "Hopefully, it's at a level that everyone can get something out of it."

Anyone can take the course from their home computers and be certified on general food safety techniques.

The health department's goal is to get more people to voluntarily take the course offered free to mark the agency's 50th anniversary this year, Mackey said.

Another hourlong online course is designed for nonprofit and for-profit groups planning temporary food service events that require a permit. By taking the online course, nonprofit groups can have their permit fees waived, and for-profit vendors would get a discount of almost half off the permit fee.

"The temporary food service event training, it's basically a similar course to what we teach in-person throughout the summer, but we wanted to make that more accessible and more available online," Mackey said.

Presently, the training is not mandatory to obtain a temporary food service event permit. Yet, health officials strongly encourage it, which is why they are offering financial incentives.

Last year, about 86 percent of for-profit vendors received the training or were certified, but only about 35 percent of not-for-profits had training.

"So we're trying to boost that number up," Mackey said. "What we found when we go out to inspect these events, where people have been trained on proper food safety practices, their events just are much more smoothly run."

The online course also speeds up the process of obtaining permits for events on short notice.

To take the health department's online courses, visit http://www.co.lake.il.us/health/default.asp and follow the instructions to register.