2023-07-07 23:01:08
Libya: Incidents of food poisoning recur despite monitoring efforts
Libyan hospitals and health centers have received, during the past few days, numbers of people with food poisoning, the number of which reached 30 in the city of Bani Walid, in addition to 11 injured in the city of Sebha, most of whom are children.
The media office at Bani Walid Hospital revealed that the cases of poisoning were caused by the injured eating meals from a restaurant in the city, and that the cases had different health conditions, but none of them were in a serious condition, but the hospital raised its readiness in anticipation of receiving more cases.
In the city of Sebha, 11 injured people, all of them children, arrived at the General Hospital, before the hospital announced that medical teams had managed to rescue them after urgent medical intervention. Medical sources confirmed that the children were from families with close ties to each other.
Mass cases of food poisoning have recurred recently. In early June, the director of the National Center for Disease Control (governmental), Haider Al-Sayeh, announced that 148 cases of food poisoning had been recorded in the city of Misrata, east of the capital, Tripoli, after they ate fast food from a cafe. .
Al-Sayeh explained, in a post on Facebook, that “the monitoring and investigation teams affiliated with the center in Misrata monitored the cases immediately, and determined the source of the contaminated food that was behind the poisoning cases,” stressing work on implementing practical measures that include the imposition of obtaining an occupational health certificate, In addition to obligating cafes and restaurants workers to a special type of health checks that are not required in the routine health certificates, and they include triple virus analysis, and a certificate of absence of tuberculosis (tuberculosis).
In mid-May, the Sebha Governmental Hospital received more than 60 cases of mass poisoning of people from the neighboring city of Samno, most of whom were women, and was caused by eating spoiled food during a social event.
The ambulance doctor, Hamza Hamdo, points out that “the numbers announced during the current year are limited, compared to the numbers of food poisoning cases that were recorded during the past year, and this is an indication of the authorities’ relative success in controlling the markets after they were teeming with spoiled food, but there is still a need to intensify Control campaigns on cafes and restaurants in particular, as they have become the main cause of poisoning cases.
Tightening control is a necessity to combat food poisoning (Mahmoud Turkia/AFP)
Hamdo adds to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that “all the cases that were monitored during the first half of this year were found to have been poisoned by the meals of cafes and restaurants, and no poisoning occurred due to household foods whose materials were purchased from shops and markets.”
During the past periods, the Food and Drug Control Center “Hukoomi”, in cooperation with government control agencies, including the Municipal Guard, carried out campaigns to inspect shops, wholesale markets, cafes, restaurants and meat shops, and it also continues to publish awareness materials on its official Facebook page. “.
The official in the Department of Support and Patrols in the Municipal Guard, Ashraf al-Mahjoub, confirms, in an interview with Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, that “the campaign expanded to include areas far from the capital and major cities, during which large quantities of spoiled and expired vegetables and food that were sold in shops and markets were seized.” And he added, “Our role in the Municipal Guard is limited to closing the violating shops, but adherence to our procedures regarding the need to obtain work permits and health certificates is still weak.”
Al-Mahjoub continues: “Merchants and shop owners were complaining about the continuous power outages in the country, and that this multiplied their losses as a result of the spoilage of their goods, especially vegetables and meat that require special temperatures, and many of them do not intend to sell spoiled meat, but restaurants buy large quantities, With their storage in bad conditions, many of them spoil, and sometimes the seller or the owner of the restaurant does not realize this, while there are those who deliberately sell spoiled foods or foods that they know are expired.”
For his part, Al-Sharif Al-Biskari, from Sebha, calls for announcing the names of restaurants in which violations are caught, or whose responsibility for food poisoning cases is verified, and he told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed: “Announcing the names of shops and merchants makes people stop dealing with them, as is A deterrent to them and others, while not announcing the names is a contribution by the authorities to concealing these crimes, and allows the recurrence of these health disasters.
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