Hygienic Food Practice among Food Workers in Jordanian Food Factories during pandemic crisis: COVID-19:comparative study

Food borne disease is transmitted easily among food handlers working in food factories. This study aimed to evaluate hygienic food practice among food handlers working in food factories in Jordan during pandemic crisis: COVID-19 . A total of 500 food handlers in 25 food factories were participated in this question survey study. The knowledge of food handlers during COVID-19 pandemic was higher than their knowledge before COVID-19 pandemic with a mean percentage score of 83.4 ± 8.3%, 73.3 ± 10.8% respectively. In general, the food handlers attitude toward safe food handling during COVID-19 was higher than their attitude before COVID-19 with mean percentage score of 91.3% ± 12.7 and 88.36% ± 10.7% respectively. The awareness of food handlers in Jordanian factories for COVID-19 requirements was with a mean percentage score of 70.4% ± 14.9%. Our study showed that fair knowledge for food handlers in food safety doesn't necessary reect their positive attitude. The overall scores for this study were 79.13% . Enforcement the governmental regulations, increasing the number of education and training courses and encourage the positive behavior food handlers would improve the status of food hygiene during COVID-19.


Introduction
COVID-19 virus is still threatening the life of many people all over the world. World Health Organization (WHO) advice many countries to follow the physical distance between individuals to reduce disease transmission. This advice can easily applied on many businesses, schools, and institutes of education. In food industry the chance to work from home is di cult, and the workers need to work in their working places, so there is a big challenge for keeping food workers in along food chain safe and healthy during COVID-19 pandemic (Wei, W.et al. 2020).
The current evidence approved that COVID-19 virus affect the respiratory system and transmitted through coughing or sneezing, there is no evidence for transmission of COVID-19 virus by food as well as the virus cant multiply in food and need human or animals to multiply in it. Infection can be occurred if someone touched any contaminated surfaces, objects such as door knobs, faucets and hands then touching his eyes or nose (Tong,Z. et al. 2020).
Many researchers have evaluated the time needed for COVID-19 virus to remain survive on inanimate objects, it was found that the survival time for COVID-19 virus on plastic and stainless steel is up to 72 hours, on copper need up to four hours, on cardboard is up to 24 hours. These values are not absolute and can be changed according to environmental conditions ( WHO, FAO. 2020).
The response of food handlers in different Jordanian factories to knowledge, attitude and hygiene practice need re-evaluation during COVID-19 pandemic case and it is necessary to refresh their data in the principles of food hygiene to reduce and eliminate any hygienic risk lead to contaminate of food or food packaging and surfaces with viruses during processing, as well as reduce and eliminate food borne Food industry in Jordan is targeting millions of people from local population in addition to exported food products to different countries worldwide ( Osaili, T. et al. 2011). During COVID-19 pandemic the food processing faces strong competitions and challenges as consumers demand high quality and safe food products and the governmental agencies need to ensure safe consumption of food along the food processing chain.
Spreading COVID-19 virus among food workers in food factories will be common worldwide and prevent spreading virus have captured many organizations awareness all over the world. FAO and WHO (2020) identi ed the keys for controlling COVID-19 virus among food handlers which include awareness of food workers to COVID-19 symptoms, providing the food handlers in food factories with written documents for rules how to prevent spreading COVID-19 among them, changing the gloves by food workers frequently and washing their hands after changing and removing gloves, adhering with physical distancing at least 1.5m and minimizing the contact among food workers, making control during transportation and delivery of food ingredients and food products by adhering with mentioned keys.
Although the training of food handler will increase their knowledge about food safety but this may not re ect their positive attitude (Mitchell, R. et al. 2007).
Many studies were done to evaluate the hygienic practice and food safety knowledge for food handlers in restaurants before COVID-19 pandemic,in this study the overall hygienic practice, the food safety knowledge and the attitude of food handlers as well as the awareness of food workers to control COVID-19 virus during COVID-19 pandemic in Jordanian food factories were conducted for the rst time in Jordan.

Research design
To assess the hygienic practice, food Safety knowledge and attitude among food workers during COVID-19 pandemic in Jordanian food factories cross-sectional study where used.

The respondents
A total of 500 food workers from 25 food factory were participated in this study, the questionnaire were sent by e mails and other social media applications and lled electronically by the workers.

Food safety knowledge questionnaire
this study targets all food workers in food factories. Forty questions divided into 4 parts. each part consist from 15 questions about good hygiene practice, knowledge, attitude and COVID-19 awareness before and during COVID-19. The scores for answering knowledge and attitude questions were recorded on a ve-point scale ranged from zero to four, with options of strongly agrees, agree, not sure, disagree or strongly disagree. But, the scores for answering the questions about hygienic practice and COVID-19 awareness were recorded on a ve-point scale ranged from zero to four with options of always, most of the times, sometimes, rarely or never. The scale direction was (4 to 0) and in some questions the scale was reversed to (0 to 4) to check the validity of the responses. According to dichotomous classi cation, negative response (Answering wrong) was given for the score less than 3, a positive response (Answering right) was given for the scores 3 and 4.

statistical analysis
Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, Version 15.0 (SPSS, Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) were used for statistical analyses in this study. The means, standard deviations, and frequencies were used as descriptive statistics. One way ANOVA test was used to compare between different parameters. results with a P-value < 0.05 were considered to be statistically signi cant.

General features of the participants
A total of 500 food handlers from 25 food factories were included in this study; 450 male and 50 female. The educational level for 60.3% was less than 10 years and had monthly income less than 400 J. D. The participants used in this study were selected from different food factories from different geographical location in Jordan; from North ( Irbid 8%), East (ArRuayshid 8%), Middle ( Amman 40% and AzZarqa 20%), South ( Al Karak 16%, Maan 8%) Figure-1. The age of participants was ranged between 18-55, and the experience ranged from 5 to 15 years.

Food handlers knowledge
The knowledge of food handlers during COVID-19 pandemic was higher than their knowledge before COVID-19 pandemic with a mean percentage score of 83.4 ± 8.3%, 73.3 ± 10.8 % respectively. The food handlers showed high knowledge in the sources of food contamination with food pathogens, food with high risk, risk factors for food poisoning, and storage conditions for food. In other hand, they demonstrated weak knowledge about reheating of cooked food, only 60% before COVID-19 and 67.5 after COVID-19 believed that previously prepared food should be reheated before eating. 65.5% before COVID-19 and 50% during COVID-19 thought that the correct method for thawing frozen food is to keep them at room temperature. 40% before COVID-19 and 55.3 % during COVID-19 from food handlers thought that healthy food workers might carry foodborne pathogens (Table 1).. previous study in South Africa to evaluate food handlers' knowledge on food hygiene (n = 159) in small and micro enterprises, the percentage of correct answers was in average 46.0% (McSwane, D. et al. 2003) and in other study in Ankara, Turkey, the average of food safety knowledge score for food handlers (n = 764) was 43.4% ± 16.3% (Bas, M. et al. 2006). In Portugal, It was found that food handlers represented good level of knowledge in personal hygiene and cross contamination, but fared worse in other areas in a study consist from 124 food handlers in 32 school canteens (Campos, A. et al. 2009). On the other hand, many studies showed that food handlers had unsatis ed level for knowledge about food hygiene issues (

Food Handlers' Attitude
The answers of food handlers about attitude questions on food poisoning is presented in Table 2. In general, the food handlers attitude toward safe food handling during COVID-19 was higher than their attitude before COVID-19 with mean percentage score of 91.3 % ± 12.7 and 88.36 % ± 10.7% respectively.

Practice the food workers for personal hygiene
The response of food workers to good personal hygiene practice before and during COVID-19 is presented in Table 3. In general, the result showed good hygiene level for food handlers before and during COVID-19 with a mean percentage score of 74.54 % ± 11.6 % and 93.61 % ± 13.6. They have weak concept in hygienic practice before COVID-19. In general, most of them show attention about the hygienic rules of preparing food as covering the lesions, washing fresh vegetables and fruits in tap water before eating, wearing gloves during handling food products during preparing food products, separating raw food materials from nished food products. the results showed good improvement in their responses during COVID-19 such as cleaning and sanitizing food contact surfaces before and after preparing food, keeping food at room temperature more than 4 hours, washing their hands with water and soap after using the bathroom, and using mask during processing time. This study showed that weak correlation between the knowledge and food hygiene practice. that means good knowledge doesn't necessarily result in good hygiene practice (Azjen, I. and Fishbein, M. 1980). Therefore, the training and educational courses for food workers should focus on critical non conformities and risk perception that may lead to unsafe practices (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2002). 54% of food handlers believed that wearing disposable gloves will be a substitute for hand washing in the food work environment. 51.5% of staff delivering food and other drivers to food premises showed that they should not leave their vehicles during delivery. Only 40% of food companies used regular reminder for customers to follow physical distancing advice and clean their hands regularly and only 54.7% food premises encouraging the use of contactless payments. In general, most of them show good attention about COVID:19 symptoms: fever, cough, shortness of breath, keeping at least 6 feet as social distancing in the workplace and when picking up deliveries from customers, methods for spreading the virus from person-to-person by coughing and sneezing.

Conclusion
The recent research shows valuable data about the level of awareness about COVID-19 requirements, personal hygiene practice, knowledge and attitude for food workers in food factories. The overall scores for this study were 79.13%. Enforcement the governmental regulations, increasing the number of, training courses and incentive the positive attitude of food handlers would improve the status of food hygiene during COVID-19.

Declarations
Ethics approval: The author declares no animals or human or even tissues used in this study.

Consent for publication:
The author declares that there is consent for publication Availability of data and material: Please contact author for data requests. The geographical location for food factories used in this study