When a 22 year old woman found a finger tip in her salad last March at restaurant in Canton, Ohio, the appendage was traced to a lettuce chopping accident in the restaurant. Unable to locate the severed fingertip, employees had gone ahead with cleaning and sanitizing the accident area. However instead of discarding the lettuce, it was placed in a cooler where it was used the next day to prepare salads.

A similar incident occurred three months later at a chain store in Louisiana after an employee cut themselves and a customer found the finger tip in her salad, and earlier this year a North Carolina man found a finger in a pint of frozen custard that was apparently scooped immediately after an employee lost the digit in an accident involving a custard machine.

While the much talked about Wendy's Chili finger case proved to be a hoax, these three verified incidents prove that accidents resulting in biological contamination of food can occur. Such accidents not only risk making customers ill and open the doors for potential litigation, but can also damage the reputation of an establishment beyond repair.

Inevitably an employee in your restaurant will cut themselves. But by taking the necessary precautions you can minimize the risk of injury and act to safeguard any food items from contamination.

According to Laura Castaneda, a former food safety inspector for the U.S. Navy and current food safety subject matter expert for 360Training.com, if proper precautions had been followed immediately following the various accidents, none of these fingers would have found their way into food products.

According to Castaneda, not only should the lettuce cutting area have been cleaned and sanitized following an accident, but any towels or other implements soiled with blood should have been discarded along with all food materials. In the Canton case, this would have meant discarding the contaminated lettuce.

"The rule is, in every food safety operation, when in doubt, throw it out," she said. "They knew a finger was missing, they just didn't know where it was. So, putting the contaminated lettuce back in the cooler shows a lack of proper employee training."

Food and utensils should be discarded, she explained, and any blood spills on food contact surfaces or floors cleaned with bleach based cleanser or other hospital grade sanitizer.

"Get rid of anything with blood on it that you can," she said, emphasizing that replacing a blood soaked towel or a knife is cheaper than the liability of contaminating food with blood.

"You should also have a protocol in place to stop all production and serving after an accident," Castaneda added.

She explained that if all serving had been stopped immediately following the North Carolina custard accident not only would the finger never have been served to a patron, but the person who lost the finger would have had a better chance of having it reattached. She said that, in her experience, incidents such as this occur when people hurry through familiar and repetitive tasks, such as scooping custard, without thinking about what they are doing.

"From my experience, this (physical contamination) occurs when the employee is in a rush," she said.

Proper food handler training, however, can help employees be more aware of their surroundings, Castaneda explained, and know how to react in these stressful accident situations, rather than going on "auto-pilot" and accidentally serving contaminated foods.