Food safety, an increasing public health issue - Cecil Lee Longdon

Food safety is increasingly becoming an important public health issue and great concern to everybody. This is due to widespread food borne diseases, which have affected children and adults due to the mushrooming of wayside food vendors.

It is public knowledge that food, that is served by these street vendors are prepared in a dirty environment and not well cooked.

Driving along the streets of Accra, one could count a thousand and one food vendors by the wayside, and the environment in which these foods are prepared pose great danger to those who patronise them.

Knowing about the water problems in the Metropolis, one could easily imagine the source of the water the farmers use to water their vegetables. At some places in Accra, vegetable farmers glaringly use water running through the gutters to water the vegetables meant for human consumption.

What is alarming is that before the raw ingredients get to the neatest professional kitchen, some amount of contamination might have already taken place along the supply chain due to poor agricultural practices, residual chemicals deposited on harvested crops, poor handling, haulage, storage and unhygienic practices at the point of sale.

Such harm when not corrected could result in health consequences leading to death in some cases.

School children whose parents are too busy looking for money and, therefore, cannot not prepare nutritious and hygienic meals for them are given money to buy food from the wayside.

These children are forced to take their breakfast, lunch and sometimes dinner from the streets. These children pick all sorts of food borne diseases from what they eat.

Fresh vegetables were seen displayed on torn and dirty sacks, broken tables propped with stones and at the mercy of the weather. This practice causes leafy vegetables to wilt, fruits to shrivel, eggs to age and root crops and plantain to rot.



All these lead to deterioration in food quality and contamination with microorganisms and worms. The same conditions affect fresh meat and fish distributed and sold to the public. May be the byelaw of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly that all animals should be slaughtered at the Abattoir might help to save the situation.