Gonzalo ‘Gonzo’ Erdozain writes:

As an avid user of Apple products, I made my way to the Apple store in Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza on Saturday to try out the iPad.

The iPad is a touchscreen-based device, with no buttons or physical keyboards. As a budding food safety geek, I noticed all the products in the Apple store were touched by thousands of people of all ages every day, and not once did I see hand sanitizers inside the store.

I had just visited a small petting zoo near the area where I had lunch. The petting zoo had a hand-sanitizing station at the exit point, which consisted of many bottles of hand sanitizer, but no water and soap to actually wash your hands – so it wasn’t optimal, but still better than nothing at all.

If I had gone to that petting zoo, and didn’t know much about hygiene or just didn’t care, I could have brought all those germs and maybe zoonoses back with me to the Apple store, rub them good on those brand new iPads and lovely miscellaneous products and then gone home. And so the next person that came to the store with the same curiosity and excitement may have gotten my lovely zoonotic gifts.

To the Apple store manager, please, for events this big, some hand sanitizer would probably be a good idea – not just sanitizing the products at the end of the day.