Sarada Vadlamani1, B. Devi Madhavi2, K. K. L. Prasad3
Food safety describes handling, preparation and storage of food in ways to prevent foodborne illness. The contamination of food may occur at any stage in the process from food production to consumption (“farm to plate”-theme for World Health Day 2015).Unsafe food creates a vicious cycle of disease and malnutrition, particularly affecting infants, young children, elderly and the sick. Foodborne diseases include a wide spectrum of illnesses and a growing public health problem worldwide. METHODOLOGY: A cross-sectional community based study was done among 150 women in the field practice area of urban health training centre, Andhra Medical College, Visakhapatnam. Data was collected by administering questionnaire after taking informed consent. Data was entered in Epi data version 3.1 and analysed by using SPSS version 16.Results were represented in form of proportions and Fischer’s Exact test was used to find significant association between variables. RESULTS: Among 150 participants, most of them were in age group of 21-30 years with mean age 33±11years.About 68% belonged to low socioeconomic status, 76.7% were housewives, and 79.3% were literates. Among the participants, 94.7% had good knowledge regarding food safety, 30.7% had good practices showing gap between knowledge and practices. In 12% of cases there was history of foodborne illness. There was significant association between knowledge and literacy status; knowledge and past history of foodborne diseases (p<0.05). CONCLUSION: There is need for an education program in the community to improve the practices among women regarding food safety to fill the observed gap between knowledge and practices.
