Impact of food hygiene practices on students’ health and prevalence of foodborne illnesses among secondary school students

Abstract

Foodborne diseases are a major health issue in society with school going children being the most vulnerable to this health problem as they regularly eat meals offered by school canteens, street sellers, and local food stores. Food hygiene practices, including poor handwashing, poor food storage, and unsafe food handling, increase the vulnerability of these pupils to infections, including diarrhoea, gastrointestinal upsets, and frequent illness. This paper has adopted a descriptive survey design to investigate how food hygiene practices affect the health of secondary school students in Ethiope East LGA, Delta State. Multistage sampling was used to get a sample of 300 out of a population of about 1,200 students. Structured questionnaire with four-point Likert scale was used to collect data. The instrument was subject-matter validated and tested on reliability. Data collection was also undertaken using ethical procedures, and statistical analysis was performed to obtain the means and standard deviations, where a 2.50 standard was used as a decision criterion. Findings show that most respondents belonged to SSS 1 (39%), SSS 2 (41%), and SSS 3 students (19%), which is good representation spread across lower senior classes. The results indicate that students tend to agree that food hygiene has a great effect on their health, with poor hygiene related to stomach aches, diarrhoea, frequent illness, and absenteeism and good hygiene behaviour related to good health. However, hygiene has impact on academic performance that many students do not take seriously. Further, the identified key determinants of food hygiene are access to clean water, sufficient sanitation facilities, health education, and personal habits, and peer influence was not considered to be significant. The research concludes that education and provision of infrastructure and monitoring of food hygiene practices is crucial to minimizing foodborne illness and promoting the overall health and well-being of students.