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Mozambique: National Sanitation and Hygiene Campaign Launched
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
1 March 2008
Posted to the web 3 March 2008
Maputo
The Mozambican government on Saturday launched a National Sanitation and Hygiene Campaign throughout the country, which is scheduled to run for the next ten months, in an attempt to reduce the incidence of diseases caused by poor sanitation and inadequate hygiene.
The campaign was launched simultaneously in all provincial capitals. In Maputo, the National Director of Health, Mouzinho Saide, told AIM "We are waging this campaign because something is wrong, and we would like to change this reality. We want to show, through practical actions, how some things should be done, such as the supply of clean water, the appropriate disposal of waste, and the construction of improved latrines".
Some of the diseases most prevalent in Mozambique, said Saide, result from precarious sanitation - including diarrhoeal diseases and cholera (transmitted by consuming contaminated water or food), skin diseases such as scabies, and intestinal parasites (often ingested with food that has not been washed or cooked properly).
Malaria too is linked to dirty conditions - notably to pools of stagnant water where the malaria carrying mosquitoes breed.
Saide noted that in the latest cholera outbreak, which began in October, 4,000 cases have been diagnosed, and about 40 people have died. He added that every year the country has about five million cases of malaria.
Speaking at the launching ceremony, Maputo City Governor Rosa da Silva called on the public to abandon such damaging practices as defecating in the open. "Changing our habits is the great challenge", she said.
In a message broadcast to the nation on Friday night, President Armando Guebuza urged all Mozambicans to participate in the campaign. Improved hygiene, he stressed, would lead to a reduction in morbidity and mortality.
It is estimated that only about 45 per cent of the Mozambican population has access to decent sanitation, a figure that falls to 39 per cent in the countryside.
The survey on basic indicators of well-being, published by the National Statistics Institute (INE) in 2001, showed enormous disparities in sanitation from province to province.
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Thus in Maputo city over 99 per cent of the population uses a modern toilet or some form of latrine. But in several provinces, over half the population has no latrine at all. The worst case is the central province of Zambezia where 93 per cent of the population was found to be defecating in the open.
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| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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