MAKKAH: Illegal foreign peddlers sell sugar-coated poison along the highways and in front of gas stations throughout this holy city, and residents are wondering if anyone regulates this informal commerce.
“The peddlers themselves are dirty,” said local resident Abu Turki. “They never wash their hands with soap.”
In the absence of environmental control, the foreign peddlers have set up their filthy stalls near the petrol stations and turned them into shops for their products that may cause hepatitis and other fatal diseases.
According to the residents of Makkah, the products are easily contaminated as they are displayed in the open air without any healthy precautions. They said what makes matters worse is that the fruits and vegetables on sale were irrigated by sewage water.
“The bad storage and the repeated touching by customers make the products rotten fast,” they warned.
Hatim Al-Zahrani, a Saudi citizen, said it was a duty of the municipality to put an end to the activities of the foreign peddlers who reside illegally in the Kingdom because they were selling certain death to the people.
“I was surprised to see the size of the fruits bigger than usual while its price was much lower than the fruits in supermarkets,” he said. “When I asked about the reason, I was told that these fruits were irrigated using sewage water.” Al-Zahrani recalled that he bought a kilogram of fruits from a foreign peddler near a gas station which caused him acute diarrhea. “When I went to the hospital, I was told that I had food poisoning,” he said. Lutfi Bakr noted that the number of foreign peddlers was increasing near gas stations along the expressways.
“They sell various kinds of fruits and vegetables which are contaminated by air and dust in addition to flies and other flying insects that may be carrying viruses and microbes,” he warned. He said the storage of these products was not healthy taking into account the cleanliness and temperature.
“Those products are rotten and contaminated, yet the peddlers insist on selling them at cheap prices in order to tempt customers into buying them,” he said.
Abu Turki, another Saudi citizen, said he was a victim of the foreign peddlers. He said he had hepatitis after eating some fruits and vegetables he bought from them.
Dr. Muhammad Abdul Wahab, head of chest diseases department at a private hospital in Makkah, said the contaminated fruits and vegetables might cause a number of epidemic diseases including typhoid, dysentery, food poisoning and others.
He called for demolishing all the shops established by the peddlers along expressways and near gas stations or else make routine inspections of all of them.
Abdul Wahab asked the health authorities to give more attention to this phenomenon and said, “if we cannot destroy the products, at least we can cover them to prevent their contamination.”
