Street food, which is very popular to the people living in urban areas like Dhaka due to its cheap price and taste, is harmful to human health as it fails to ensure sufficient safety standards, say experts.

Thousands of people are eating unsafe street foods in the capital everyday. A research paper shows that most of the consumers are rickshaw-pullers, labourers and informal sectors (43 percent), white-collar workers (19 percent) and students and children (12 percent).

"The street foods are being prepared with unhygienic handling. And sold in open air in a dirty city, which carry many germs," said Dr Mahfuzur Rahman Bhuiyan, a former national consultant of World Health Organization (WHO).

He said the vendors are using unsafe water to prepare street food and they are also reusing water in serving consumers, forcing them to be affected in many diseases.

A 2010 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) study shows that 100 percent of street food vendors have no training on food safety and food serving or handling. About 58 percent of the vendors do not cover their food while selling.

About 63 percent of them use supply water for drinking purpose and almost 100 percent of the vendors did not use hand gloves while preparing and serving food, the study says.

An icddr,b study released in February 2015 found that about 50 percent of the street food tested was contaminated with various diarrhoea-causing bacteria, and over 40 percent contained traces of the faecal pathogen. Bacteria can cause bloody diarrhea and, in extreme cases, kidney failure or death, it says.

Noor-E-Alam, registrar of the Liver and Gastroenterology Department at Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital, said the street foods, which are being produced in unhygienic state, may increase risk of typhoid, hepatitis A and E and other waterborne diseases like cholera and diarrhea.

Observing that patients of hepatitis A and E are on the rise in the capital due to eating unsafe street food, he called upon the authorities concerned to seal off all unregistered makeshift food shops to protect public health.