| مستخلص: |
Background: A Street-vended food is a food that is prepared on the street or at home, which is ready for consumption without the requirement of any other form of preparation. Diseases related to food are shared among most developing countries including Ethiopia. This is mainly due to bad sanitation, poor food handling practices, inadequate food safety laws, and lack of basic education on food handling among street food vendors.Objective: To assess the hygienic practices and associated factors among cooked street food vendors in Bedele, and Mettu town, Southwest Ethiopia, 2021.Methods: A community based cross-sectional study design supplemented by qualitative methods of data collection was employed on 384 cooked street food vendors from December 7/2020 to January 2/2021. Thus, a consecutive sampling technique was used to select the study subjects for quantitative data and in-depth interview and observation for the qualitative part. Data was cleaned, coded and entered into Epi Data 3.1 and then exported to SPSS version 25 for analysis. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the findings and logistic regression analysis was used to determine the association. The P-values<0.05 was considered as statistically significantly associated. Finally, data triangulation was done.Results: A total of 384 food venders were participated in this study. About more than half, 52% of the venders had a good level of hygienic practice. Variables such gender [AOR: 2.33; CI: 1.32, 4.09], educational status [AOR: 2.48; CI: 1.40, 4.39)], availability of running water source at the site [AOR: 5.25; CI: 3.32, 10.25] and toilet [AOR: 0.06; CI: 0.03, 0.10] shown a significant association with hygienic practice. “Lack of hand washing, hair cover, gown, glove, teaspoon, wrapping the foods with old newspaper and leaf, lack of market stalls, exposing the foods to sunlight, and touching money and foods without hand washing, roadside vending, dirty surroundings, and overcrowding were identified variables with key informant interview”.Conclusion and Recommendation: The hygienic practice among venders are low in Mettu and Bedele Town. Thus, model mobile market stall construction, rapid formal training for the venders and food handling facilities are necessitated |
