To the Editor—Hospital canteens are places where patients and medical personnel typically take their daily meals. Adequate sanitation of the hospital canteen is required because its cleanliness impacts both patients and hospital employees. According to the recent report by Winston et al., 70% of doctors use their hospital canteen each week, with 2 visits per week on average.Reference Winston, Johnson and Wilson ¹ We used a standard sanitation checklist to evaluate public canteens in 100 hospitals in Thailand. According to our survey, canteens in only 5 hospitals (5%) met the criteria noted in this standardized checklist (the standards can be seen at nutrition.anamai.moph.go.th/temp/files/hospital/0.pdf). The checklist covers the important sanitation factors including eating place, kitchen and food preparation place, food and drink, eating utensils, waste managements, and cook and maid. Notably, all 5 hospitals were private facilities. In fact, the results of a previous survey from Thailand indicated the high prevalence of positive stool cultures and smears for parasites in hospital food handlers.Reference Wiwanitkit and Assawawitoontip ² Clearly, poor hospital canteen sanitation leads to outbreaks of gastrointestinal infection; the report by White provides a good example of such an outbreak.Reference White ³ Indeed, sanitation standards in hospital canteens are an important issue that are commonly overlooked by hospital infection control authorities.Reference Brown, Crawford, Nerlich and Koteyko ⁴ We anticipate that similar problems are found in the hospital canteens in other developing nations as well.