Nutritionist Wants Health Education For Food Vendors

A nutritionist, Miss Christiana Fawole, has called on local government areas in Nigeria to organise lectures for restaurateurs and road-side food sellers on food-borne diseases.

Fawole made this call in an interview with pressmen in Lagos.

She said that such lectures would improve the knowledge, attitude and practice toward the fight against food-borne diseases and food safety.

“The spread of diseases through food is still a common problem which results in our high morbidity and mortality rates.

“Restaurant owners play an important role in ensuring food safety.

“The health talks, lectures and programmes will provide greater insights into how we can produce, process, store and prepare our foods to reduce getting sick from them,’’ she said.

Fawole decried the level of knowledge about environmental sanitation and how it impacted on the national rate of those affected by food-borne diseases.

She said that there was a high level of ignorance about food sanitation in the country.

“People just prepare and sell foods in very dirty environment; restaurateurs locate their shops in unhygienic places and the joke there is that they still make huge sales.

“We are just condoning acts that are poisonous and dangerous to our health.

“There is need, no doubt, to educate food sellers on regular basis as to how they can secure the health of their customers.’’

She said that local government areas were closest to the people hence, their ability to reach out the most to these food sellers who were mostly located within their jurisdictions.

She said more health talks, workshops or lectures needed to be organised by governments to reduce the nation’s mortality rate.

“Government also should regularly send out their health officials to monitor how food sellers were going about their businesses.

“There is also the need to keep our environment clean at all times.