The world recently celebrated the Global Handwashing Day, a day dedicated by the Global Handwashing Partnership, which began in 2008, to increase awareness and understanding of the benefits of washing hands with soap.
This year’s theme: “Clean hands–a recipe for health”, emphasised handwashing as an important part of keeping food safe, preventing diseases, and helping children grow strong. “It reinforces the relationship between handwashing and food– including food hygiene and nutrition –and enjoins us to make handwashing a part of every meal.”
Nigeria joined its peers in the celebration, without much funfare, except for pockets of activities in select cities by some corporate organisations. Experience has shown that containing the recurrence of diarrhoea and related illnesses and minimising their mortality rate are the best attempts at the preventive stage through proper hygiene. While investing in safe drinking water, hygiene, and sanitation infrastructure as well as awareness and promotion of behaviour change programmes are the most efficacious and most cost-effective ways of dealing with this menace.
It was the realisation of the importance of preventive approach in dealing with the communicable diseases, which prompted the interest of some corporate bodies, such as Reckitt Benckiser, in line with the United Nations’ Children Education Fund’s (UNICEF’s) call to organise programmes aimed at educating the populace, especially the most vulnerable groups, on the benefits of handwashing, adoption of personal hygiene lifestyle and providing necessary infrastructure that supports basic hygiene.
Reckitt Benckiser, through its leading antibacterial brand, Dettol, in celebrating the day, organised an event for students at the L.E.A Model Primary School, Maitama, Abuja, where over 2,000 school pupils, drawn from seven public and private schools, that are beneficiaries of Dettol’s School Hygiene Programme across four Local Governments in the Federal Capital Teritory (FCT), to listened to the lecture on the benefits of adopting a good personal hygiene lifestyle. The high points of the event were the symbolic hand-wash relay and Dettol’s donation of hand washing sites to help facilitate and maintain proper handwashing habit by the school children.
The company, at the event, listed some of its contributions to the promotion of personal hygiene, especially in handwashing. Reckitt Benckiser West Africa General Manager, Dayanand Sriram, said “over the past seven years, Dettol has provided over 32 handwashing sites and educated over seven million children, parents and teachers on the importance of handwashing through the School Hygiene Programme.”
With these efforts, every year, over 4 million young children are saved from killer diseases caused by germs, through the act of proper hand hygiene.
