Your life is in your hand: The urgent need for good hygiene practice
It is a true that a clean hand is important in the promotion of good hygiene practice. It is even more so when the saying that ‘Your life is in your Hand’ is seen from the perspective of ensuring excellent personal hygiene, writes ANIEFIOK UDONQUAK.
Since the hands are often used in food preparation and in most cases many people eat with their fingers, it could be rightly assumed that people could contract diseases when their hands are not clean. On the other hand, the need for hand-washing with water and soap at “critical times’’ could be the deciding factor both in maintaining good personal hygiene and in hygiene promotion activities.
According to experts, the critical times that individuals should wash their hands with water and soap include after making use of the toilet, before food preparation, after breastfeeding, before eating and before and after changing children’s nappy.
This was recently brought to the front burner of public discourse when the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) under its Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programme marked this year’s Global Hand Washing Day in Akwa Ibom State, which usually takes place on October 15.
Experts believe that over 3.5 million death among children annually in the world could be avoided if hand washing with soap is practised. This explains why the Global Hand Washing Day seeks to “inculcate a good sense of hygiene in the populace particularly among child.”
Speaking at this year’s Global Hand Washing Day held in two local governments of Nsit Atai and Obot Akara, in Akwa Ibom State, and attended by pupils from selected primary schools, the need to promote personal hygiene beginning with hand washing with soap was brought to the fore with the benefits of doing so clearly highly.
Effiong Essien, general manager of Akwa Ibom Rural Water and Sanitation Agency, reminded the pupils that personal hygiene beginning from hand washing with water and soap would prevent many illnesses, including diarrhoea.
“As agents of change and leaders of tomorrow, UNICEF has introduced sanitation and hygiene in schools through the establishment of schools environmental health clubs in schools. This is aimed at producing the needed attitude and behavioural change that will prevent and sanitation related diseases,” he said.
Again, experts maintain that making hygiene promotion children-centred will ensure that school pupils who are closer to their mothers will expand the practice to the communities and ensure that hygiene promotion is sustained.
For a child who is constantly taught in school about hand washing with soap at critical times, such a child will also insist that other members of family should wash their hands with soap during the critical times.
Jaggmeet Uppal, a well-known hygiene consultant, believes that there should be no excuse whatsoever for people not washing their hands under running water with soap, adding that poverty should not be an excuse.
According to him, since individuals do take their baths everyday, there should not be any reason for them not washing their hands with soap at the critical times.
Again, in schools, Uppal says low-cost hand washing facilities can be installed with the pupils taking ownership, saying such behaviour will ensure good hygiene habit.
And, he ably demonstrated this at a primary school in Nsit Atai, the pupils using simple tools a y-shaped wood and a cross bar, empty bottles of water, strings and gravel were able to set up hand washing facility known as tippy taps where more 600 pupils can wash their hands with soap within 30 minutes.
Apart from the importance of personal hygiene as key to good health, Uppal has also highlighted the five major domains of hygiene, which include safe excreta management, safe drinking water management and personal hygiene with emphasis on hand washing with soap at critical times as being necessary in hygiene promotion.
Others include food hygiene as well as environmental hygiene, including solid and liquid waste management.
With more than 27 percent households in Nigeria reporting unsafe disposal of faeces of their youngest child under three years old, known to be prevalent among households that defecate in the open including those in the coastal parts of the country, the economic lose of poor sanitation is estimated at N455 billion yearly.
According the World Bank, about 121,800 Nigerians, including 87,100 children under five, die each year from diarrhoea – nearly 90 percent of which is directly attributed to poor water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). An indication that poor sanitation is a contributing factor as well as malnutrition and malaria.
Specifically, it is known that early childhood diarrhoea contributes to under nutrition, stunting and wasting, which are associated with malnutrition that reduces long-term cognitive development.
And since “tourism can be a significant source of income, employment and foreign exchange,” good sanitation practices can contribute to travel and tourism estimated at $9.4 million annually. This is so because the global travel and tourism competitiveness report ranks countries according to several indicators, one of which is sanitation status.
So, the importance of good hygiene practice is encompassing beginning with the family, the environment and the economy ensuring that the pupils stay healthy while the country reaps from travel and tourism.
For the school pupils who participated in this year’s Global hand Washing Day celebration, it was an opportunity for them to ‘raise their hands in support of hygiene’ and this they did after taking part in the making of the activities of the day. To encourage them to take the issue of personal hygiene seriously, the pupils and their schools were given prizes in the quiz and drawing competitions, both of which centred on hygiene promotion as they all realised that their lives are in their hands.
There is therefore the urgent need for good hygiene practice, not only in the family and schools, but also in the community. Indeed, the benefits of good hygiene cut across several sectors, including good health, sustainable environment and the economy.