Food and Drug Authority educates vendors on food safety

Food and Drug Authority educates vendors on food safety

food safety: Market women in Kumasi were invited to an open forum by the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) to discuss the need of practicing good food safety.

The discussion is one of several events commemorating World Food Safety Day, which is observed annually on June 7.

The FDA employees and market women earlier took part in a float around several of Kumasi’s streets to raise awareness of food safety.

The forum often helps market women become more aware of and promote preventative, early detection, and management strategies for foodborne hazards.

“Food Standards Save Lives.” was the theme for this year.

The main goal of the event was to emphasise to attendees how important food safety is to our everyday life.

Mr. Roderick Daddey-Adjei, Deputy Chief Executive Officer for FDA, addressed the group and emphasized the need of resonating strongly with a shared objective to protect everyone’s health and well-being.

He pointed out that a number of factors, including food security, human health, agriculture, and sustainable development, improved the efforts of the international organization to ensure the safety of the food and should, therefore, be followed.

According to Mr. Daddey-Adjei, food standards cover a wide variety of topics, from sanitation to the meticulous testing of components. As a result, he urged making food safety a top priority in public discourse in order to lessen the burden of foodborne illnesses worldwide.

According to him, infectious or poisonous agents—which are sometimes imperceptible to the human eye—are generally what lead to foodborne diseases.

He continued by saying that people were harmed when bacteria, viruses, parasites, or chemical substances entered their bodies through tainted food or drink.

He argued that preserving food safety was essential along the whole food supply chain, from cultivation and harvesting to processing, storage, and distribution, and finally, to preparation and consumption, and he urged the populace to pay close attention to it.

He stated that it was their responsibility to guarantee that every morsel that reached the dish was safe since they were the guardians of the public health.

In order to find effective and long-lasting solutions to the problems relating to food safety, he recommended the participants to work together with the government regulatory bodies.

The leader of the Racecourse Market Women Association, Nana Afia Kyeiwaa, bemoaned the market’s awful state and urged the government to take prompt action to guarantee that food safety regulations were upheld.

She said that because of the nature of the market, women were not encouraged to be hygienic when selling, and this should alert authorities to take notice. Nana Kyeiwaa said that the majority of the market women at Racecourse conduct their trade in an unclean atmosphere and urged the government to modernize the area.

Credit: myjoyonline