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| Sunday, 6 April 2003 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Sri Lanka still has a need for clean water and basic hygiene: Poverty threatens health by Carol Aloysius Letchimi , 12, lives in a eight foot by six foot one roomed house standing cheek by jowl with a long row of similar houses known as 'line' rooms on an up country tea estate in the Nuwara Eliya district .The room serves as a bedroom, sitting room and kitchen for the family of six who barely have room to move when they huddle up to sleep at night after a hard day's work.
There is no running water from taps or latrines for the families who live here. So they are forced to bathe in a nearby stream and defecate among the bushes. Cooking is done on an open fire using firewood collected from the surrounding area in the middle of the room. It is Letchimi who does the cooking since she is the eldest of the children. On cold days the fire is kept smouldering most of the day except when the family is asleep and the room is always full of smoke. It is little wonder thus that most of the children including Lethchimi suffer from various respiratory problems including chronic asthma. Eight-year-old Anula lives near a huge garbage dump at Hendala close to the canal. The dump serves as the playground for both Anula and her little brother Nimal, who sometimes rummage among the garbage in the hope of finding plastics and glass bottles which they could sell to the nearby ' bottle man' who in turn would sell it to a re-cycle plant. The cats, dogs and crows that constantly surround this garbage pile, cannot dampen their enthusiasm to find 'gold' amidst this enormous garbage dump. At nine months, baby Renuka has been admitted to the premier Children's Hospital , the Lady Ridgeway at least three times in her short life for a mysterious throat ailment. The paediatrician who examined her was baffled by what he saw, until he, with his assistants visited the child's home.There they discovered that the residents in the house immediately next door were manufacturing batteries. " Inhaling the contaminated air was what probably caused the child's throat to be burned", says the paediatrician. These are only a few examples of the life threatening risks that children in Sri Lanka and indeed most of the Asian region face due to widespread poverty, lack of basic hygiene , safe water, sanitation and air pollution. The biggest culprit is the unhealthy environments in which they live. To quote Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Director General of WHO in her message for World Health Day which falls tomorrow ( April 7), " The biggest threats to children's health lurks in the very places that they should feel safest - home, school and community. Every year over 5 million children aged 0 to 14 die mainly of diseases related to their environments - the places where they live, learn and play. These diseases include diarrhoea and malaria as well as other vector borne diseases, acute respiratory infection and accidents." So how do we , as mothers, parents and community minimise these risks that our children face every minute, every day in their growing up years which in turn rob them of their vitality and deprive them of the right to good health to which they are entitled?
These cost effective and simple strategies include ; providing safe and adequate water supplies for children, ensuring good ventilation, clean fuels and improved cooking stoves to decrease indoor air pollution leading to acute respiratory diseases; protecting children from inhaling smoking fumes, keeping the environment free of disease carrying vectors by clearing garbage every day, making roads safer for children,preventing home accidents and most importantly targeting hygiene education for both children and adults. The most important thing is that they are simple and cost effective which makes the task of implementing them easy. The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council ( WSSCC) , which also advocates similar strategies has gone a step further. It suggests a Hygiene Code for every community. The rules are simple and are specially directed to women, particularly mothers and other care takers of young children. They include basic requirements as safe disposal of all faeces ideally in a latrine; Teaching all family members to use soap and water and to wash hands thoroughly after contact with faeces before touching food and before feeding children; washing food eaten raw thoroughly; ensuring that cooked food is eaten without delay or thoroughly re-heated; keeping surfaces of food utensils clean and ensuring that all food is covered and finally the safe disposal of all household refuse that could breed disease carrying vectors. Yet even these simple rules are not adhered to by the average Lankan mother and the rest of the community, either because of a lack of knowledge or adequate means to do so. This is evident by the fact that Sri Lanka falls into the worst (Disastrous) hygiene level among the world's developing countries.
This tragic situation can only be reversed by awareness raising and educating women to ensure healthy environments for their families. With malnutrition in children under five at an unacceptably high prevalence rate of 33 percent, and wide spread anaemia and iodine deficiency ,the Lankan mother should be encouraged to provide balanced meals for her family even with the least expensive vegetables and food substitutes. In a country that abounds in fresh fruits and vegetables this should not be a difficult task for even the poorest mother who could grow her own vegetables for her family in her own backyard. Mothers can play a key role in another area that paves the way for healthy environments for children. They can for example be given a kind of crash course in simple home medication , such as taking the temperature of their children or dressing a simple wound or cut so that they needn't wait to take the child all the way to a dispensary. Empowering women especially mothers is thus the key to creating healthy environments for children. They more than anyone else in the community can both inculcate and ensure good hygiene, safe and adequate water and sanitation to the future citizens of this country. |
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| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
As Dr. Bruntland states in her message, " Strategies have been
developed to combat these threats to children's health. They need to be
implemented on a global and national scale." Which is why this year's
World health Day has been dedicated to ensuring " Healthy
Environments for children".
