The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has lamented that Nigeria is losing no fewer than 150,000 children annually from diarrhoea alone, largely caused by unsafe water, sanitation & hygiene practices. The Fund likens the number deaths as being equivalent to a big passenger aircraft crashing every day!
In a statement to mark hand-washing day today by its Chief of Communication, Doune Porter, UNICEF said that a survey conducted across six states in Nigeria have revealed gaps in hygiene due to poor hand-washing practice among the people.
Although the survey, part of which was released today to coincide with the Global Hand-washing Day, found that an average of 82 per cent of the people washed their hands before eating, while only 53 per cent of people washed their hands with soap after defecation. It found that only about 14 per cent of the people wash their hands with soap after cleaning a child’s faeces.
According to the agency, regular hand-washing with soap after using toilets, after changing children’s nappies and before eating or handling food saves more lives than any single vaccine or medical intervention. It also noted that such practices can reduce deaths from diarrhea by almost half and deaths from acute respiratory infections by one-quarter. This is as handwashing with soap was also an important line of defense against the spread of Ebola in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, to mark Global Hand-washing Day in Nigeria, UNICEF, with the Federal Ministry of Water Resources, the National Task Group on Sanitation and other partners plans to reach at least 10 million Nigerians this year through high profile handwashing demonstrations in schools and communities, mass rallies, road shows, airing of jingles on radio and television, and dissemination of hand-washing messages on U-Report, Facebook and Twitter.
The eighth Global Hand-washing Day comes less than a month after the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, including hygiene for the first time in the global agenda. One of the SDG targets is to achieve ‘access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene’ by 2030.
UNICEF says improvements in hygiene must supplement access to water and sanitation, or children will continue to fall victim to easily preventable diseases like diarrhoea.
“Along with drinking water and access to toilets, hygiene, particularly hand-washing with soap, is the essential third leg of the stool holding up the Goal on water and sanitation,” global head of UNICEF’s water, sanitation and hygiene programmes, Sanjay Wijesekera said, adding: “from birth, when unwashed hands of birth attendants can transmit dangerous pathogens, right through babyhood, school and beyond, hand-washing is crucial for a child’s health. It is one of the cheapest, simplest, most effective health interventions we have.” [myad]
