Intensify Education on Child Faeces Disposal
By RCN Ghana · 01 October 2008
There is the need to intensify education on safe disposal of child’s faeces in Ghana. This is because a recent report from the Ghana Statistical Service, the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS 2006) indicates that only about 43% of nursing parents in Ghana dispose their child’s faeces safely.
There is the need to intensify education on safe disposal of child’s faeces in Ghana. This is because a recent report from the Ghana Statistical Service, the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS 2006) indicates that only about 43% of nursing parents in Ghana dispose their child’s faeces safely. This may be an indication that many Ghanaians still think child’s faeces are harmless. But this is contrary to expert knowledge that child’s faeces are not different from adult faeces and are also poisonous. Human contacts with faeces may result in several illnesses including diarrhoea, the second largest killer of children, worms, trachoma, which is the world’s number one cause of preventable blindness, and acute respiratory infections such as pneumonia. According to the Ghana Health Service, more than 70% of reported illnesses at the OPD are water, sanitation and hygiene related.
This may also imply that when people adopt safe hygiene practices, the rate of infections can reduce since the principal routes of transmission of infectious (diarrhoeal) diseases may be broken. The MICS 2006 report, released by the Ghana Statistical Service in June 2008, identified six different child faeces disposal methods in the country, only two of which were safe disposal methods. According to the report, about two out of five nursing parents or guardians either rinsed the child’s faeces into a toilet or latrine or managed to make the child use the toilet itself. In this case the child’s faeces are not exposed to the environment and thus kept out of human contact. The unsafe methods are instances where the child’s faeces are rinsed into drains, thrown into garbage containers or heaps, buried or l…
There is the need to intensify education on safe disposal of child’s faeces in Ghana. This is because a recent report from the Ghana Statistical Service, the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS 2006) indicates that only about 43% of nursing parents in Ghana dispose their child’s faeces safely. This may be an indication that many Ghanaians still think child’s faeces are harmless. But this is contrary to expert knowledge that child’s faeces are not different from adult faeces and are also poisonous. Human contacts with faeces may result in several illnesses including diarrhoea, the second largest killer of children, worms, trachoma, which is the world’s number one cause of preventable blindness, and acute respiratory infections such as pneumonia. According to the Ghana Health Service, more than 70% of reported illnesses at the OPD are water, sanitation and hygiene related.
This may also imply that when people adopt safe hygiene practices, the rate of infections can reduce since the principal routes of transmission of infectious (diarrhoeal) diseases may be broken. The MICS 2006 report, released by the Ghana Statistical Service in June 2008, identified six different child faeces disposal methods in the country, only two of which were safe disposal methods. According to the report, about two out of five nursing parents or guardians either rinsed the child’s faeces into a toilet or latrine or managed to make the child use the toilet itself. In this case the child’s faeces are not exposed to the environment and thus kept out of human contact. The unsafe methods are instances where the child’s faeces are rinsed into drains, thrown into garbage containers or heaps, buried or l…
