Assessment of Food Safety Knowledge, Attitude and Practices among Poultry Slaughterhouses Plant Workers in Khartoum State- Sudan

Abstract

This study seeks to implement prerequisite program (sanitation standard operating Procedures (SSOPs), personal hygiene, pest control, good hygiene practices (GHPs), good manufacturing practices (GMPs), storage and shipping under sanitary conditions and proper) before develop and implement hazard analysis critical control points system (HACCP) in a poultry slaughterhouses in Khartoum state to control hazards because chicken meat is susceptible to biological, chemical, and physical contamination mainly at the all stages of production. The main objective of this study is to identify, control, eliminate or reduce the chemical, the physical as well as the biological hazards of poultry meat and poultry products plants and set up regulations & the HACCP rules. Furthermore, this study provides HACCP team development plants with and computable monitoring evaluation devices. The method used to collect data from a poultry slaughterhouses plant was a mini survey conducted in a random sample of thirty chicken slaughter houses in Khartoum State. The survey collected two types of data. General observations pertaining to the surrounding sanitation and the sanitary conditions of each slaughter house in the sample. Detailed data pertaining to the state of hazard analysis and critical control points in each of the thirty slaughter houses in the sample. The latter is collected through direct interviewing of top management personnel and workers separately. A questionnaire was designed about implementation of the general requirements and hygienic in poultry slaughterhouses plant in Khartoum state, and distributed to 30 XI poultry slaughterhouses directors, another questionnaire was designed for workers about implementation of personal hygiene practices and distributed to 32 workers in poultry slaughterhouses plant in Khartoum state. It is important for all direct contact to have ownership in the HACCP plan and to participate in its development as appropriate, the preliminary results of the survey showed that 63.3% of the respondents are hygienically qualified for the job, indicating that they are aware of the food hygiene program, the remaining 36.7% are not qualified implying that they need more training in the food hygiene, and the observation obtained, showed the importance of implementing HACCP system to have a good finished product without or with low bacterial contaminant, free from pathogenic bacteria and acceptable for human consumption. Also the results found that, highest percentage 83.3% of poultry slaughterhouses did not apply developed personal hygiene procedures, did not applied adoption of poultry meat product hygiene practice manual 80%, did not applied cleaning and disinfection procedures 70%, all the poultry slaughterhouses plant have not Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs), expected only one company had developed total quality management (TQM) and all poultry slaughterhouses did not implemented hazard analysis critical control points system (HACCP). To implement Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points System (HACCP) in poultry slaughterhouses in Khartoum state, it will be needed to implement prerequisite program at the first and then take responsibility for enacted regulations & the HACCP rules. If the HACCP system is properly and systematically applied in all food processing plants in the country food will be safe and a number vector born diseases will be eradicated and consequently the pressure on hospitals will be released.