The heroes who face squalour and filth to protect us from disease
A recent closure order against a Swindon fast food business was merely the latest potentially life-saving achievement for the council's Environmental Health Officers
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When it’s impossible to calculate number of lives saved and miserable, dangerous bouts of illness averted
By Barrie Hudson
“Not all heroes wear capes,” runs one of the many modern proverbs to have popped up in recent years and done the rounds online.
Something else familiar to just about anybody with an internet connection is criticism of the organisations we fund through various forms of taxation. That criticism might relate to potholes turning streets into suspension-wrecking moonscapes, unchecked antisocial behaviour or just about anything in between. Sometimes the criticism is entirely justified and sometimes not, and sometimes is it directed at entirely the wrong people.
It is important to remember, though, that there are public sector teams on all manner of front lines without whose work we would be at greater risk of enduring a plethora of horrors and miseries, some of them potentially agonising, debilitating or worse.
In this spirit we suggest today that the work of Swindon Borough Council’s Environmental Health team should be praised rather more widely by all of us than is currently the case.
We were prompted to do so by a recent council announcement relating to a Manchester Road business called Shinwari Kebab.
District Judge Kirsty Allman, sitting at Swindon Magistrates Court, imposed a Hygiene Emergency Prohibition Order on Shinwari Kebab. She had been presented with evidence from an inspection by the council’s Senior Environmental Health Officers, who had acted on a complaint by a member of the public that there were rats on the premises.
When those officers arrived on 5 June, what they found would have been enough to send most of us running home for a shower, gagging all the way.
There was the stench of rodent urine, droppings and evidence of gnawing in several areas of the premises, including food preparation areas. Rat urine stains and droppings were found on lids of plastic containers for spices within the kitchen.
Gnawed flour bags were also found on shelves in amongst rat droppings. Holes were found in walls, floors and doors, making it easy for the rodents to enter the premises.