DPH not buckling down on health tests

The Department of Public Health is pushing ahead with new laboratory tests for food handlers despite a strong lobby from the business sector against the plan.

Health Secretary Joseph K. Villagomez acknowledged that the tests are costly but that the overall well-being is more important.

“I agree it places an added burden on them. But this regulation would have come anytime — in good times or in bad times,” he said. “They have every right to contest it.”

Villagomez recalled that the business sector also opposed a prior health-screening regulation for foreign workers, requiring them to undergo tuberculosis, syphilis and HIV tests.

The tug-of-war between the DPH and the private sector over that regulation carried on for two years.

The regulation came into effect on February.

“Everybody contested the alien health-screening regulation. But we’ve managed to screen 34,000 people. We’ve treated a number of people with communicable disease,” Villagomez said.

A new health regulation that requires food handlers to be tested for communicable diseases again put the DPH and the businesspeople into yet another round of muscle-flexing.

Villagomez said the plan was meant to avoid food-borne diseases.

The costs for the tests are to be borne by the employers, according to the regulation.

Waitresses, waiters, bartenders, packers, cooks fall under the definition of food handlers.

“We have documented cases of people who got ill after eating from certain restaurants. They were very sick. We cannot tolerate that,” Villagomez said.

The Hotel Association of the Northern Mariana Islands said the proposal was ill-timed because with an economic crisis that the private sector has to grapple with, the tests would have been too much to pay for.

HANMI estimates that the tests would cost $150 per employee. Businesses, it said, also stand to suffer from the lose of productivity while the employees skip work to be tested.

HANMI said the health screening for all foreign workers should be enough.

“They should be able to go only once — get their clearance and that’s it. We don’t disagree with the intent of the proposed regulations. But it is just another example of a government agency adding to the already high costs of doing business here without thinking things through,” HANMI said in a statement.