Rainy Season: Experts Caution On Children’s Common Illnesses

Experts in the medical sector have warned parents to guide against children’s most common illnesses, especially during the rainy season, to avoid raising infant mortality rate in the country.
The experts listed the common illnesses to include water and food borne diseases, which trigger cholera and diarrhea, flu, common cold and catarrh, dengue, pneumonia, leptospirosis, which causes bleeding of the lungs and meningitis, among others.
In an exclusive interview in Port Harcourt, last Monday, a medical doctor, Rammyson Keke, stated that the warning became necessary because of the intensity of rains between June and August, resulting in lots of health complications, which mostly affect vulnerable children.
Keke charged parents to be extra careful and give more attention to how they dress their children to avoid exposing them to common cold, and catarrh while in schools and other places, explaining that children were expected to be dressed in thick clothes and stockings in order to check pneumonia.
A health educator in the Rivers State Ministry of Health, Mrs Doris Nria explained that most people living in areas surrounded by dirty water and poor drainages were easy targets of insects such as mosquitoes, cockroaches, houseflies, rodents, among others, which make them susceptible to malaria and dengue.
She described dengue as an “infection carried by mosquitoes and very common in tropical countries during the rainy season. It feels like the flu at first, but you later notice other symptoms like rashes, bleeding, muscle and joint pains, headache, high fever and vomiting which lead to cholera, dehydration and diarrhea”.
Nria urged residents of the state to ensure that they keep their drainages and surroundings clean while taking measures to check the negative effects of the rainy season.
She advised those living in the rural communities and villages to ensure that they boil their drinking water, if the sources of such water appear contaminated to avoid contracting cholera, diarrhea or pneumonia.

Susan Serekara-Nwikhana