Knowledge, attitudes and practices of food handlers about food safety at Fayoum restaurants.

Abstract

Background: All food handlers are required to possess adequate food safety knowledge and food handling skills to handle food hygienically during preparation and to ensure that food is safe by the time it reaches the consumer especially during a corona pandemic. The aim of this study was to assess the level of knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding food safety among food handlers at local and international restaurants in Fayoum. To determine the correlation between the knowledge, attitudes and practices of food handlers about food safety during the corona virus pandemic. Study design: a comparative quantitative cross-sectional study. Subjects and Method: a descriptive cross-sectional research design was conducted with a convenient sample of 100 food handlers from Fayoum. The data is collected using structured questionnaires arranged by interviews. There are four tools: first; Food handler"s personal and socio-demographic data, second; Food handlers" knowledge Questionnaire, third; Food handlers" practices and fourth; Food handlers" attitude toward food safety scale. Results: More than one quarter of the food handlers had poor knowledge about food safety and less than one fifth of them had good knowledge level. The majority (98.0%) of the food handlers had a positive attitude toward food safety and controlling food temperature. Around two thirds (66.0%) of the food handlers had poor practice level about food safety and controlling food temperature. More than one quarter (30.0%) of the food handlers had fair practices. Conclusion: Lack of knowledge and practices of food handlers are important a potential risk. Therefore, it is recommended that there is an urgent need to train programmers for food handlers and repeat the training at specific time intervals to ensure that the learned data is applied in daily life practice and reduce the occurrence of epidemics.