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Two incidents that made the papers
154 people sick from one ice machine
A leaking valve in one Finnish ice machine put 154 people down with norovirus in 2016. Sixty-four contaminated machines were found across Cleveland care facilities in 2018.
Press reporting, citing a food scientist, describes two ice-machine outbreaks: in 2016 a leaking air-ventilation valve in a machine in Finland was linked to 154 cases of norovirus; a 2018 study of five Cleveland hospitals and two nursing homes found bacteria and yeast in 64 ice machines.
What a single machine can do
One valve, one bin, one contaminated batch, and every drink and display served from it for a shift. The scale of an ice-machine failure is the scale of the machine's output.
The catering exposure
A buffet cold display drawn from a contaminated machine spreads the problem across everything on the line. An event with three hundred covers is a public-health incident in one afternoon.
The alternative has no bin
Sealed cold cells are frozen individually and wiped. There is no reservoir, no valve and no scoop.