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This study assessed various factors associated with poor compliance of street food vendors to safety measures in the Techiman Municipality with emphasis on the World Health Organization’s five keys to safer food policy. Two sets of questionnaires were designed to collect data from 150 respondents (140 food vendors and 10 officials of the Environmental Health and Sanitation Agency) in the Techiman Municipality. Data was collected based on the level of awareness, food hygiene/handling practices and effectiveness of regulatory bodies in the Techiman municipality. Overall, awareness of food hygiene was high (91.4%) and depended on vendor’s educational level (Chi-square = 7.810, P

Hospital patients are highly dependent on a good food control, clean kitchen and clean food.

Does contextual information about disgust influence children's food consumption and subjective experience of taste? Three- to eight-year-old children (N = 60) were presented with two identical foods, yet children were led to believe that one food had been contaminated by sneezing and licking, while the other was clean. When given the opportunity to eat the foods, 5- to 8-year-old children consumed more clean food and rated the clean food's taste more positively; younger children did not distinguish between the foods. The relation between contamination and subjective taste held even among children who ate both foods and had direct evidence that they were identical. These data indicate that children's consumption behavior and food preferences are influenced by information external to foods themselves.

Poor diet accounts for a larger burden of disability and death than tobacco, alcohol and physical inactivity combined.[1] The World Health Assembly has recognized this as a priority and has challenged member countries to reduce non-communicable disease (NCD) mortality by 25% by 2025 targeting their determinants.[2] Reaching these ambitious targets is possible, but it will require decisive action on diets and tobacco smoking if we want to make a difference.[1] Certainly diet can deliver these reductions rapidly, possibly in less than a decade, and particularly by reducing cardiovascular disease burden, still one of the most important cause of death globally.[3,4]But the impact of these diseases can be substantially lowered. Several natural experiments have shown the dramatic changes in mortality can be observed after changes of risk factors at population level, many attributable to changes in food intake [5]

Every year, one in eight Canadians suffers from foodborne illness. Food contaminated with certain bacteria, viruses, and parasites are some of the main causes of illness. Food can become contaminated anywhere in the farm-to-fork continuum. This chapter focuses on the control of pathogens at the retail level. The global nature of our food supply means that food often has to travel long distances before reaching the local supermarket. As such, contamination during transportation is a real concern. Some of the risk factors that can be associated with transportation are temperature abuse, unsanitary cargo areas improper loading/unloading practices, damaged packaging, poor road conditions, and human error. Once food arrives at the retailer and undergoes further handling, storage, and/or processing, factors such as pH, water activity, as well as time and temperature can influence pathogen survival and/or growth in food. Preparation steps such as in-store slicing can potentially expose the food to harmful microorganisms. Factors such as clean food contact surfaces, good worker hygiene, employee education, stock rotation, and temperature control are essential in order to reduce potential microbiological hazards associated with foods. Susceptible populations, in particular, must exercise caution when consuming higher-risk foods.

SUMMARY Australia and the USA are major international meat exporting countries. Both countries conduct programs to monitor and survey for antibacterial residues. Australian programs use a urine screening test, whereas the US programs use tissue fluids as the test medium. The development of surveillance programs to provide rapid feedback to producers is a feature of the Australian programs. The programs in each country compare favourably with regard to numbers of animals tested, results and action taken to prevent residues. The results of the Australian programs justify the promotion of a ‘clean food’ image for Australian meat products with respect to antibacterial drugs.

To the Editor.— The epidemic of motor vehicle injuries and fatalities may be no less amenable to control than, say, infectious diseases such as pertussis or measles. As two papers in September's issue of Pediatrics suggest, the task is not necessarily a technical one, such as vaccine development, but a behavioral one analogous to the introduction of effective hygienic practices. In recent decades the majority of North American parents seem to have come to accept clean food and water, as well as childhood immunizations, as normal parts of life.

WHEN THE US MARINES were sent into Lebanon in 1958, more than 55% of that force became ill from contaminated food or water, or from insect-borne diseases. But when they again were sent to Lebanon in 1982, the troops had only a 2% morbidity from these environmentally associated illnesses during the 21 months they served there. Playing a major role in reducing the illness rate when the Marines returned was a group of experts, including an environmental health officer, an entomologist, and several preventive medicine technicians combined into what is called a "Mobile Medical Augmentation Readiness Team." The US Navy has 10 such teams. "In 1982, in that Marine encampment in Lebanon, we took care of our water, we made sure we had good clean food, we saw to it that refuse was disposed of properly, and we kept the fly population down," says Douglas A. Ehrhardt, PhD, a US