EPISODE 9 - ENVIRONMENT POLLUTION AND OUR HEALTH

There is one aspect of our healthcare that is not yet getting the attention that it deserves in this environment and that is preventive healthcare in terms of cleanliness.

When I was young and that’s talking of the sixties and seventies I used to hear about sanitation inspectors and how people dreaded their visitation.

Then we didn’t even have sanitation day but your surrounding better be clean when they came.

Now, people sit on uncovered gutters and cook and leave the food uncovered and Nigerians go and eat the food; you go to our motor parks particularly where our big luxurious buses are loaded and you can’t find a decent toilet to ease yourself in; Go to our markets –I mean built up shops attached to building like in idumota and you may have to walk a mile to see some filthy place where you have to pay as much as N50.00 just to pee.

Typhoid fever was never a major issue in this country until pure water became the mainstay of quenching our thirst outside the home.  Some will say that the germs in water do not kill. May their faith continue to work for them but I would be more willing to buy that statement if you refer to a clean flowing stream than poorly treated packaged water kept under the sun for the bacteria in them to thrive. And when they finish drinking the water they drop the nylon on the streets where their fellow human beings are deployed to clear.

What of our so called private schools? Some of them are just damp holes that are not even fit for animals because of their poor ventilation and poor hygiene status. And parents go and dump their children their either due to the cheap cost of the school or for some sentiment’s reasons.

Even if we can’t equip our hospitals well enough to revive and treat patients who  would have lived with the use of modern equipments, let us at least employ, train and deploy sanitary inspectors to go inspect our roadside canteens, motor parks, shopping plazas, estates and congested neighborhoods and so on. School inspectors should be made to function better by giving them the tools and protection they require while in the field.

Let NAFDAC and SONS do more than test samples sent to their officers ;let them send out officers on regular basis to go and buy random samples of pure water and medication from the market and see if they pass the test. And while reprimanding the defaulters we have to also hold the inspectors accountable if they do not do their work.

I believe our health index will be much better if we do that.