By Nimake Earland
The United Nations Children’s Fund, (UNICEF) has lamented that 9 out of 10 schools in Nigeria have no handwashing facilities for children to wash their hands while in school.
The Chief of Field Office, Bauchi, Amose Kudzala stated this at the commemoration of the 2021 global handwashing day on Friday at Hazibal Hotel.
He said,” this year’s event is yet another opportunity to promote handwashing with soap to motivate and mobilize people around the world to improve their handwashing habits”.
Kudzala commended Bauchi state for leading other states in the implementation of WASH-related interventions adding that ” Dass and Warji are one of the first LGAs to attain ODF status and 4 other LGAs have achieved Similar feat”.
He called on the State government to provide more funding support for WASH interventions in the 20 LGAs of the state, as well as consistently release counter contributions to provide WASH facilities for all communities.
In his remarks, the commissioner for the ministry of Water Resources Bauchi Honourable Ahmad Aliyu Jalam,
Said that there is a need to take immediate action on hand hygiene across all public and private settings to take the response and control the Covid-19 pandemic and cholera epidemic just as hand hygiene must therefore become everybody’s business.
The commissioner also called on the general public to make hand hygiene a mainstay in public health interventions beyond the epidemic, pandemic and create a culture of hand hygiene.
While saying that large populations of deaths recorded each year especially in developing societies such as ours like Nigeria are related to poor access to water, sanitation, and hygiene with more than half of such deaths attributed to diarrheal diseases and children being the most vulnerable.
He said that regular handwashing with soap at critical times has been shown to reduce the incidence of diarrheal diseases by nearly 50 percent phenomenon by 25 percent and a recent study found that regular hand washing reduces the infection of Covid-19 by 36 percent.
Hand Washing Day: Bauchi records 39,795 cases of Cholera outbreak in 8 years-CSOs
He said that the Bauchi State governor Senator Bala Abdulkadir Mohammed is fully committed to sustaining and accelerating progress in access to safe water supply effective sanitation and safe hygiene practices for the continued betterment of the lives of people of the state.
The theme: our future is in our hands – les’ move forward together, and prevent the spread of Covid-19 and cholera in Bauchi State
Today’s celebration is therefore expected to mobilize millions of people around the world to participate in hand washing activities.
