The Knowledge and Practices Toward Food Safety Measures at Home in the Lebanese Community

Soc Work Public Health. 2024 Mar 1:1-16. doi: 10.1080/19371918.2024.2323697. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTHygienic measures practiced at home are highly related to the occurrence of food-borne diseases during food production, storage, and handling. Contaminated food remains a major cause of several diarrheal diseases, hospitalizations, and spikes in medical expenses. In our current study, we aimed to assess the knowledge of food safety and the food safety and hygiene practices at home among the Lebanese population. A cross-sectional study was conducted through an online questionnaire including two sections. The first section included socio-demographic characteristics of participants, whereas the second section included questions related to practices and knowledge about food safety, divided into five parts; personal hygiene practices, dry and cold storage, sanitizing and cleaning and food intoxication. A total of 1101 Lebanese above 18 years participated and provided their responses to the questionnaire. Overall, the majority of participants had fair knowledge about food safety where 96.8% of the participants answered correctly about preventing microbial growth on food. 77.9% of those participants acquired their knowledge about food safety from articles, workshops, or the internet. Moreover, females, people with children and those who cook for themselves scored significantly higher than others (68.8, 70.6, and 70%, respectively). In comparison to younger participants (67.8%),...
Source: Social Work in Public Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Source Type: research