The overall knowledge level of respondents with respect to food
safety is summarized in Fig. 2. Most of the respondents (80.2%)
answered questions related to personal hygiene correctly. Good
percentage of the employees answered correctly about crosscontamination
(63.4%) and definition of foodborne illness
(65.75%). The respondents had least knowledge about the temperature
and time control (44.8%). Study by Sani and Siow (2014)
reported that their participants acquired more correct answers
with the questions that are related to maintaining good hygiene,
thus, indicating good knowledge with respect to personal hygiene.
More than half of the respondents (52.9%) knew about the role
of Staphylococcus aureus as a pathogen of food. The reason for
asking respondents about this question was to ensure that they are
aware about foodborne pathogens and were concerned with the
outbreaks that occurred throughout the world (Afifi & Abushelaibi,
2012). Additionally, S. aureus is considered as the third most
important cause of foodborne diseases in the world (Normanno
et al., 2005), where recently, isolation of methicillin-resistant
S. aureus (MRSA) strains from several food producing animals has
been reported, mainly due to contamination by infected food
handlers during further preparation (de Boer et al., 2009). Hence,
this indicated that most of the respondents in this survey had the
knowledge regarding this particular matter. Abdul-Mutalib et al.,
(2012) reported that 73.4% food handlers in Kuala Pilah, Malaysia
had good knowledge in matters related to foodborne pathogens.
This implies that the good food safety knowledge among food
handlers might be related to training since majority of the respondents
(94.3%) attended 1 or more food safety training as
demonstrated in Fig. 1. Previous research found that food safety
training increased knowledge regarding food safety issues