KEEP SURRONDINGS CLEAN ...Food vendors advised (Page 29)

Story: George Ernest Asare, Kumasi.

FOOD vendors in the Kumasi metropolis play crucial role in the lives of people who patronise their services.
Chop bar(traditional food joint) operators at Kejetia, ‘Atwemunum’, Central Market, the Asafo Neoplan Station and other areas, offer all kinds of indigenous food such as ampesi, fufu with all kinds of soup and fresh game (bush meat), as well as banku and tuozafi (TZ) to the public from dawn to dusk to keep body and soul together.
There are other food vendors, mostly women, who sell roasted plantain, yam , cocoyam, maize and bread along the principal streets in the metropolis.
While some of the food vendors in the metropolis operate in a clean environment, others operate in dirty surroundings that pose a health hazard to customers.
Some food vendors in the metropolis have specialised in selling food items very close to refuse dumps, public places of convenience, at the sides of dusty roads and other filthy environments.
Ironically, the city authorities and medical personnel seem to have shirked their responsibilities of ensuring that food is sold to the public in environmentally clean areas.
At the Central Market and Asafo, for example, some food vendors sell their food very close to choked gutters which attract houseflies that spread communicable diseases such as typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery and diarrhoea.
At other areas where the environment is a bit clean, the vendors wash the used plates and bowls in the same basin, using the same water from dawn to dusk without considering the health implications of their actions and inaction to the public.
It has also become the practice of some ‘chop bar’ operators to use the same napkin for their numerous customers to clean their hands.
Commenting on the filthy environment that some food vendors in the Kumasi metropolis operate in, Mr Kofi Abebrese, a Kumasi-based businessman, urged the Inspectorate Division of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly to intensify its activities to ensure that food sold to the public does not cause any health problems.
He pointed out that some of the food vendors were ignorant that their selling food in filthy areas could create health problems for their customers, hence the need for the Assembly to educate them regularly.
He said it was important for the Assembly to also ensure that food vendors in the metropolis were regularly educated for them to appreciate the need to sell at environmentally clean areas to prevent the spread of communicable diseases.
Mr Abebrese pointed out that the National Health Insurance Policy initiated by the government would not yield any positive result if the activities of food vendors create health problems for the consuming public, stressing that certain diseases could be prevented if the vendors created healthy environment for their customers.