Food Safety Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice of College Students, Ethiopia, 2019: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Background. Since the dawn of human history, foodborne diseases have been a problem for all societies, and it is an increasing public health issue worldwide. The objective of this study is to examine knowledge, practice, and attitude in food safety among college students in the city Gondar, northwest Ethiopia. Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 430 randomly selected college students in Gondar City, northwest Ethiopia, from October 8 to November 30, 2019. The data was gathered through a self-administered questionnaire. The collected data were checked for completeness, coded manually, and entered into Epi Info version 7, then exported to SPSS version 26 for more data checking, cleaning, and analysis. One-way ANOVA was done for examining sociodemographic variable association with KAP, and Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to measure the association among food safety knowledge, attitude, and practice scores. The $p$ value < 0.05 was considered statistically significant for both tests. Results. The number of females was higher among the study participants (65.5%). The mean age of participates was $21.1\pm 9.14$ (SD) years. The higher percentage (45.7%) of the participants were students in the second year. The overall scores of the food safety knowledge, attitude, and practices of the respondents were 35.7% (good), 38.0% (good), and 29.1% (positive), respectively. Participants with differences in gender, year of study, and food safety training had a substantial variation in overall food safety knowledge ( $p$ value < 0.05). The findings have clearly shown that knowledge of food safety does not directly affect the attitude towards food safety ( $p$ value > 0.05). On the other hand, overall food safety practice differed in terms of sex, year of schooling, and knowledge of food safety ( $p$ value < 0.05) among participants. Training and knowledge score had significant correlation among respondents ( $p$ value < 0.05). Conclusion. This study revealed that the overall knowledge, practices, and attitude towards food safety among college students were very low. There was a significant association between knowledge and practice while food safety practices were independent with an attitude among the students. Such results indicated that there could be problems with foodborne diseases. Therefore, the findings of this study proposed that strength should be done to improve the existing food safety knowledge, practice, and attitude in college students in addition to their normal education.