Loading...
Hepatitis A virus may contaminate food, resulting in large outbreaks. One such cluster of 68 cases occurred in Tennessee in 1988. A careful case-control investigation traced the source to sandwiches prepared at a fast-food restaurant by a cook who was an IV drug user. None of the 12 subjects who microwaved the sandwiches before eating them had clinical illness, but two had serologic evidence of infection. Subjects whose sandwiches were not microwaved were more than nine times as likely to acquire hepatitis A disease -- a significant difference.
Microwaving kills commonly encountered bacterial and viral pathogens, but it is not clear whether the heat or vibrations from the microwave frequencies are responsible. Although this study does not pr…