Pradhan Saili S, Cacodcar Jagdish A, Jose Dhanya, Akarkar Nikhil S
Directorate of Health Services Goa, Goa, India.
Department of Community Medicine, Goa Medical College, Goa, India.
J Family Med Prim Care. 2024 Aug;13(8):3313-3318. doi: 10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_1857_23. Epub 2024 Jul 26.
Access to safe and nutritious food is key to promoting good health. An estimated 600 million fall ill after eating contaminated food, for which food handlers may constitute a common source of contamination. In addition to unhealthy food handlers, disease carriers handling the food play an equally important role in transmitting these diseases and pose a significant threat to public health. This study, therefore, aimed to know the morbidity profile among the food handlers employed in various food establishments in Panaji city.
Using stratified sampling techniques, we conducted a cross-sectional study among 227 participants selected from 12 food establishments. We did three visits to each food establishment. We excluded food handlers who were unavailable despite three visits at fortnightly intervals and those who did not consent to the study. We administered a pre-designed and pre-structured questionnaire to each participant. A general examination and laboratory investigations, including stool and urine routine, were performed on all participants. We performed descriptive and analytical statistics by using SPSS version 14.
Out of the 227 study participants, 79 (34.8%) had at least one morbidity at the time of examination. None of the food handlers had received a single dose of typhoid, hepatitis A, or cholera vaccines. Most (74.4%) study participants did not administer deworming tablets.
We found that the health status of the study participants was substandard. Food safety may be in peril among food handlers with lower education backgrounds with morbidities as they may have little understanding of the risk of microbial contamination of food. Therefore, it is essential to create awareness among them.
获取安全且营养丰富的食物是促进健康的关键。据估计，每年有6亿人因食用受污染食物而生病，食品从业人员可能是常见的污染源。除了不健康的食品从业人员外，处理食物的疾病携带者在传播这些疾病方面也起着同样重要的作用，并对公众健康构成重大威胁。因此，本研究旨在了解帕纳吉市各食品企业所雇佣的食品从业人员的发病情况。
我们采用分层抽样技术，对从12家食品企业中选取的227名参与者进行了横断面研究。我们对每家食品企业进行了三次走访。我们排除了尽管每两周走访一次仍无法联系到的食品从业人员以及那些不同意参与研究的人员。我们向每位参与者发放了一份预先设计和构建好的问卷。对所有参与者进行了包括粪便和尿液常规检查在内的一般检查和实验室检测。我们使用SPSS 14版软件进行描述性和分析性统计。
在227名研究参与者中，79人（34.8%）在检查时至少患有一种疾病。没有一名食品从业人员接种过一剂伤寒、甲型肝炎或霍乱疫苗。大多数（74.4%）研究参与者没有服用驱虫药。
我们发现研究参与者的健康状况不达标准。在有疾病的低教育背景食品从业人员中，食品安全可能面临风险，因为他们可能对食物微生物污染风险了解甚少。因此，有必要提高他们的认识。
