Did you know that watching TV while putting away groceries can increase your risk of foodborne illness? This according to the so-called "experts that staff the Canada-wide consumer line operated by the Food Safety Information Society" in Alberta who were cited as saying in an Alberta newspaper yesterday that multitasking, when handling food, could increase the risk of foodborne illness.

Maybe the experts took info from this press release
http://www.umich.edu/~bcalab/articles/APAPressRelease2001.pdf and imagined that it would apply to foodborne illness, leading the group to conclude that:

"Juggling multiple chores can result in other food safety problems as well. Food safety can be compromised in situations such as:
– Filling up the car with gas on the way to shop for food could contaminate groceries with chemicals on unwashed hands;
– Eating while working at a desk or driving a car can spread bacteria from unclean surfaces into food;
– Watching TV while unpacking groceries or while doing after-meal clean-up can delay refrigerating perishable food within two hours, thus allowing harmful bacteria to start developing."

There are many factors which can increase the risk of foodborne illness, like putting poop on fresh produce,  having poop get into processed peanut butter, or leaving poop on your hands, but I’ve never heard of multitasking increasing the risk of foodborne illness.

If someone knows of a study examining multitasking and increased risk of foodborne illness, please forward the information. Until then, it’s just another example of the ways various groups — check out FSIS’s supporters and you’ll get an idea of the various groups, http://www.foodsafetyline.org/english/about.html — blame consumers for foodborne illness
(http://www.foodsafety.ksu.edu/en/article-details.php?a=3&c=32&sc=419&id=1030).