World Hands Washing Day commemoration peak at Karimjeee

The Secretary General for The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare Blandina Nyoni speaking to journalists in Dar es Salaam recently.

By Elisha Magolanga, Hussein Ndubikile TUICo

The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare has prepared the commemoration of the World Hands Washing Day which commemorates on October 15^th each year.

The commemoration peak which will be held in Dar es Salaam at Karimjee grounds and has given the slogan “Hands Washing with Soap, Save Lives”  

The aims of commemoration is to educate and encourage the society about the importance of hands washing with soap to prevent from communicable diseases including cholera, diarrhea, hookworm, eye diseases, fungus as well as air transmitted diseases like cough and pneumonia.

Addressing journalists the Secretary General Blandina Nyoni said that the commemoration will continue to encourage societies on environmental cleaning, research on hygiene habits that will improve health services to the society and facilitating private sectors on the values of hands washing with soap.

     

Blandina said that failure to consider washing hands behavior resulted to spread of diseases where by children under five years are most affected their growth hence mortality rate. 

“The World Health Organization statistics shows that about 1.5 million children die of diarrhea each year while in Tanzania 2010 statistics shows 102,351 under five years    children were transmitted diarrhea diseases whereas 440 among them were died” said Blandina.   

She said that if the society could consider hands washing with soap behavior, death could not happen because the research shows that hands washing with clean water and soap diarrhea could be reduced for 42 to 50 percent as well as 30 percent for air transmitted diseases.

“We are witness of diseases which spread through dirty hands as they disturb our society. This is due to the fact that there is big number of people who do not wash their hands after toilet service, after cleaning toilet, before food preparation, and before eating and feed children” added the Secretary General.

The Ministry of Health urges the general public to have habits of hand washing because the statistics shows that only 20 percent of Tanzanians wash their hands before food preparation and only 13 percent of toilets have hand washing equipments.

“This is the sign that hands washing after toilet service rate are still in low capacity” stressed Blandina.