Council Charges Govts On Preventive Health

The Environmental Health
Officers Registration Council of Nigeria has urged all levels of the government to review their health policies from curative to preventive health.
The Registrar of the council, Mr Augustine Ebisike, made the call at a mandatory continuing education programme for registered health officers in Awka on Wednesday.
Ebisike said the emphasis on curative health had resulted in huge costs to the governments.
“For instance, instead of continuing to waste funds promoting Roll Back Malaria, let us promote Roll Back Mosquitoes. “If we promote Roll Back Mosquitoes, we empower our people to clean their environment and reduce the incidences of malaria with fewer mosquitoes,” he said.
He said that Nigerians collectively spent more than N96 billion annually on drugs to cure malaria.
Ebisike also expressed worry that for many years, governments at all levels had placed embargo on employment of environmental health officers, who were empowered by law to enforce sanitation standards.
“The incessant outbreak of diseases such as cholera and lassa fever in some states is another confirmation that all is not well with environmental sanitation in our country,” the registrar said.
He noted that the workshop was targeted at practitioners to draw their attention to growing evidences of deviation from known norms of practice.
“Some state authorities are succumbing to the pressure of resorting to using environmental health practitioners to generate income into private purses which is wrong.
The workshop is to re-emphasise to practitioners that we must practice with the highest standard of integrity,” he added.
The National President of Environmental Health Officers Association of Nigeria, Mr Aliyu Zakariya’u, urged the participants to ensure that the larger society benefitted from their training.
Declaring the training open, the Commissioner for Health in Anambra, Dr Lawrence Ikeako, commended the association for the programme.
Ikeako, who was represented by the Director of Administration in the ministry of health, Mr Edwin Unachukwu, urged them not to relent in ensuring a disease-free society.
President of the Society for Environmental Health, Mr Moses Aniefiok, presented a paper titled “The Influence of Socio-Political Factors in the Performance of Environmental Health Functions in Nigeria: The need to re-brand”.
Aniefiok said in the paper that more than 70 per cent of the health problems were environment-related, which he noted was putting the country in bad light.