CHILD SAFETY AT SCHOOL: THE SCHOOL FOOD DILEMMA

I have become most worried of late over the entire issues surrounding the safety of children at school; this has let me into direct involvement in social movement with focus on the safety of the school child.

Most worrisome of late is the trendy act of schools making lunch provisions for school children, in some schools it is compulsory while in others it is elective. What this translates into is that parents have no right anymore to determine what meal their children have for lunch which some parents (mostly career ones) see as a big relief to them. This trend does not take into cognisance that there are some children that are very sensitive to certain meals which their digestive systems are not too comfortable with. One of my children falls into this category, he is very sensitive to beans and each time he eats beans it gives him running stomach continuously. I am not aware if provisions are made for such peculiarities.

My concern is not just on the food only but I also believe schools should be allowed to focus more on the core of their business instead of getting distracted by other add-ons which seemingly create convenience but has a huge health and safety underlying consequences. I think we should allow the schools to focus more on education and if they want to serve lunch or snacks to school children, it should be sub contracted to a third party reputable caterer whose hygiene and food preparation processes are verified and certified safe. If you sub contract feeding of the school children to a caterer, that caterer becomes a food vendor to the school, it is the right of the school to determine the processes and hygiene standard they want the caterer to operate with. The school administration has the right to audit the food preparation site, processes, primary sources of food stuff, the medical status of the catering team and many more. When we do not do this, we create room for the safety and health and our children to be compromised, ideally this should be government responsibility through the Public Health Unit under the Ministry of Health. We also feel this agency has also failed the Nigerian public and in getting things right, the responsibility has fallen on the organisation that contracts the vendor.

If the food handlers have Salmonella typhi, Hepatitis A, Tuberculosis or other form of food borne diseases, the school children stand a risk of contracting such diseases. Under the Food Safety and Security Standards Protocol and even the Public Health Standard, it is expected that before anyone gets involved in the process of handling public food, the individual must undergo a food handlers medical examination to ascertain his/her level of fitness to handle food. It is also important that food samples, cooked and uncooked are also routinely taken for scientific analysis to guaranty a level of safety for consumers. We do not see this happen in most times in our environment. 

Let us quickly take a look at the 16^th July 2013 case of Food Poisoning of School Children in Bihar School in India. In Indian Government’s efforts to make children go to school and also have a decent meal while in school as a result of poverty in India which has led to malnutrition in children, the government made lunch available for every school children in each school day. This policy provides mid-day meal for roughly 120 million students between the ages of 4 – 12 years old across 73,000 schools in India Monday to Friday.

Disaster struck in July 2013 when at least 23 students died and a dozen more fell ill after eating mid-day meal contaminated with pesticide. It was reported that the children who complained about the food were rebuked by the school Head Mistress who has been earlier informed by the Head, Cook that the new cooking oil was discoloured and smelled odd. The cook was not left out of this incident because she was also hospitalised as a result of the poisoning. Children complained of stomach ache 30 minutes after eating the meal, they took ill with vomiting and diarrhoea. The number of sick children overwhelmed the school and some were immediately sent home forcing their parents to seek help on their own. 16 children died on-site, 4 children reported dead on arrival at the hospital while others died at the hospital, a total of 48 children fell ill from contaminated food.

Indications were that the food was contaminated by an organophosphate, a class of chemical commonly found in insecticides. A certain Dr. Amat Kant JHA said the survivors were emitting toxic vapours which led to the suspicion that they have been poisoned by organophosphate. Police forensic report finally claimed the cooking oil contained “very toxic” levels of monocrotophos, an agricultural pesticide. It was later found out that the oil was purchased by the Head Mistress from her Husband’s grocery store. Officials reported that they believed the cooking oil must have been stored in containers formerly used in storing pesticides. 19 of the students’ bodies were buried on a near school ground in protest but these had no means of bringing the children back to life.

I took my time to share this story because a lot can be deduced from this. Yes, it is difficult to keep inspecting the number of cooking sites catering for about 120 million children across 73,000 schools but I feel if it impairs the safety of our children, we will all device a way to work safely around this issue common us all.

It is important also for parents to get involved in the goings-on in their children’s schools; we are most times too busy to get concerned. Every extra money we earn at the expense of our children has a costly effect on the long run; the effect is never instantaneous but cumulative. Decisions on how schools are governed, policies formulated etc. are mostly taken in Parents Teachers Association (PTA) meetings which most parents find extremely difficult to attend.

If the issue of safety and security of the school child must be rightly addressed, it must run on 3 pillars:

·         The Government

·         The School Management

·         The Parents

We need more active involvement in clearly engaging the schools and also making useful contributions in influencing Government’s policies on education, we cannot be disjointed from this when our children are deeply involved. Let’s not add to the number of children that have died in pursuit for education but let’s take a stand and collectively correct the ills in schools to enable our children have a healthy and safe environment for academic excellence.

Our next publication will be on School Bus Safety, we need you to follow up on the sequence and leave a comment after reading.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bihar_school_meal_poisoning_incident

ehi@ohsm.com.ng 

WORLD DAY FOR SAFETY AND HEALTH AT WORK 2014: HEALTH AND SAFETY USE IN CHEMICALS

Let us ensure we do something in our places of work and homes today, no matter how small. Chemical use has become an integral part of our modern daily lives and we cannot dispute this fact. With the trend of development in divers areas, chemical usage will certainly be on the rise and we obviously may not be able to stop this but it is within out rights to adequately control the effects and levels of exposure. This is called chemical management processes.

Hearing the name "Chemical" your thoughts might be as erroneous as mine was years back thinking after all i do not use chemicals. You might be right but not in absolute.

If we have had cause to clean our toilets, mop our floors, wash our clothes and involved in any way in either domestic or industrial cleaning processes using any of the cleaning agents, we have had dealings with chemicals.

Have you had medications or fumigated your house of late, have you used any form of pesticides or insecticides owing to malaria endemicity within our region, then we have had contact with chemicals. 

“Chemicals are key to healthy living and modern convenience. They range from pesticides that improve the extent and quality of food production, to pharmaceuticals that cure illnesses, and cleaning products that help establish hygienic living conditions. Chemicals are also critical in many industrial processes for developing products important to global standards of living.

However, governments, employers and workers continue to struggle to address controlling exposure to these chemicals in the workplace, as well as limiting emissions to the environment”  International Labour Organisation.

Do you go through the roads where you are exposed to heavy vehicle fumes? That is another form of chemicals. Which ever way you look at it, chemicals have come to live with us and it is our responsibility to know the contents of the chemicals we are exposed to and the inherent health hazards. This will absolutely be the first step in safe guarding our kidneys and lungs which are the two major organs where chemical inhalation really hurts us as human beings.

By virtue of exposure to chemical inhalation in your work processes, you are by right expected to undergo medical evaluation test twice a year to look at the functionality of both your lungs and kidneys and possible damages that have been constituted due to your chemical exposure level. The medical evaluation processes include but not limited to:

 

·         Spirometry test

·         Electrolyte, Urea and Creatinine 

These are very basic and periodic medical evaluation that focus mainly on the state of your lungs and the kidney. Upon completion of the evaluation, if there are spikes or indicators that warrant a further Physician’s review, we will gladly make this referral because early detection gives you a better disease management opportunity and increase our survival chances. 

These are not obviously the only areas where chemicals hurt. What about people who daily work with chemicals as Industrial Chemist, others who apply them daily for general cleaning or blasting corroded pipes and rusty metals, we should also get concerned about these ones. The effects are not only on the internal organs but also on the skin surface and that is why you hear of skin burns, skin tissues and the likes of it. 

Chemicals have high spilling potentials in our workplaces if processes are not well spelt out and managed. Chemical spill could lead to death of a group of people depending on the nature of chemical, quantity spilled, proximity to the chemical and duration of the chemical contact before medical help came their way.

Every chemical available for use, the user must be well informed of the chemical hazardous contents and every form of information that is available as it concerns the chemical. There is always an accompanying document to chemicals called Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) or Safe Handling of Chemical (SHOC) cards, these documents are made available within each chemical type to equip users with all the handling information necessary. We have realised that most people do not even read these documents, they get too familiar with the chemicals as working tools and they handle them without reading the accompanying chemical handling information and people get affected at different degrees.

Having been informed on the chemical inherent danger and handling processes, there is also the need for everyone who will get involved in the application of those chemicals to be fully protected with adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) which is expected to protect the user from the harmful effects of the chemicals. When we say PPE we do not mean any form of PPE, we are referring to requisite and adequate PPEs addressing the specific threats posed by the chemical types. Of late we have noticed in most companies and workplaces, people just go to safety shops to buy anything just because they were told PPE is a work pre-condition and the PPE they end up acquiring has no form of relevance with their risk exposure they intend to address, this is not safety.

Outside the chemical information and provision of PPEs, there is also the need for adequate training of the personnel that will daily use the chemicals. This is a very critical point in the entire chemical handling processes. That you used a similar chemical in another environment or project location does not mean the processes and application methods must remain the same even in the age to come. We must learn to submit ourselves to training and retraining even on the chemicals we feel we are so knowledgeable of, when you introduce any form of new chemicals there must be the need to retrain your people to adapt their skills to the new chemical type. When there is any form of change in the application processes, we must also undergo a retraining to ensure adaptation to the new processes.

What is our level of preparedness to chemical hazards response? There is a concept called Remedial Action Plan (RAP) which is put in place to remedy any form of release of threats or severity when there is a failure in our existing health and safety processes or management system. Example is having informed your employees on the hazardous nature of the chemical in use, you have made provisions for all the necessary PPEs and adequately trained them on the application processes and use of the chemical type and you still experience chemical spills into the eyes. You should also be proactive enough to make provision for eye wash within the workplace; the eye wash can be used to quickly irrigate the eyes to limit the harmful effects of the chemicals before having access to adequate medical attention. These and many more are some of the processes that can limit our chemical hazard exposure within our workplaces and safeguard lives in no little way.

In rounding off on this article i will also point out the prevalence of chemical hazards as a result of storage. We have also been to many workplaces where chemicals are stored in clinical cans and other form of storage materials without adequate labelling and sad to know this is also a huge contributor to domestic hazards. In my days in active clinical services, we have had instances where children were rushed into the hospitals as a result of chemical absorption; they drink kerosene, medical syrups in bottles and other forms of colourless chemicals stored in cans within the reach of children and mostly infants in our homes. 

In some cases, chemicals are stored in cans without proper labelling and anyone could work with some wrong assumption that could lead to a very costly end. Even the temperature under which chemicals are stored should be a key condition to consider in the entire chemical hazard management processes. These requirements are all spelt out in the Material Safety Data Sheet and Safe Handling of Chemical documents and i think we should give these conditions due consideration in our continuous efforts in working with chemicals.

I wish every reader a happy World Health and Safety Day at Work 2014 and we are looking forward to doing something different God willing in 2015. If anyone must die, let it not be as a result of chemical hazard exposure. Stay safe.

You can also checkout what we are doing on facebook in trying to change the world. Kindly follow us on www.facebook.com/changingtheworldnetwork, please like the page and join of on this global movement for social change.  

ehi@ohsm.com.ng

CHILD SAFETY AT SCHOOL: PARENTS ARE GETTING TRAUMATIZED

We are having a new wave of challenge in Nigeria which bothers more on the safety of the school child and the negligence in school management.

It is global desire that every child has access to quality education across regions of the world, we in Nigeria in African region are battling towards ensuring this goal is achieved. There are obvious challenges ranging from the state and standard of education coupled with the cost of education. These are huge enough challenges for parents owing to the failure on the part of government in their inability to provide requisite and enabling infrastructures in schools and measurable regulations of the entire educational system. There are public schools which are generally a far cry of what schools in the real sense should be, there are places where children seat on the floor to learn and even in some regions within the country where children learn under trees or buildings without roofs. I get really worried what kind of education or learning that can be achieved under such conditions.

In trying to find a way out of this total mess in Nigerian education sector, access to quality schools have fallen into the hands of the private sector groups even some of these schools are owned by individuals who destroyed the education sector when they were in government. Parents in their honest desire to give their children quality education have swooped into patronising these private schools where a child access to quality education is sold at an astronomical rate beyond what most parents can even afford. This has placed parents under increased daily pressure and undue stress which has become a huge confounder of the decreasing health expectancy of the Nigerian people.

It has become even more frustrating the government inability to rightly regulate these schools and this failure on the part of government bites the emotions of parents and sometimes leaves most parents with very heavy traumatic experience. The quality and standard in academic delivery is an issue for another day but in the context of this expression we need to look at the issue that bothers on the health and safety of these children while under the care of the schools.

Lately, we have heard of a number of cases where kids who were conveyed to schools by the school bus which their parents are invoiced for,  end up being killed due to the carelessness and recklessness of the school bus drivers. This further leaves the parents with such an enormous pain that nothing can sooth. I cried helplessly at work one afternoon when my wife called me on the phone to tell the school bus that my children ride on has killed a school child under the driver and the minder's care, i literally died at the break of that news. The boy who was about 3 years old, an only son of his parents was crushed by the school right before his two elder sisters who alerted from the same school bus, what a trauma. I was told the boy got down from the bus but his water bottle fell from him and rolled slightly towards the tyre of the bus and the boy went for the water bottle the bus was suddenly reversed and crushed the boy to death right in front of his house. As i write this story, there are still tears in my eyes because i am yet to get over this heart renting picture. I am grateful to God for his mercies everyday, placed in the same condition as this parents i am not sure i will survive but i thank God each time i see the parents of this little boy and the way God has helped them to manage and cope with the situation. There are cases too many to recount.

There was another case where a school bus loaded beyond the capacity of the bus was conveying children to school and it caught fire, some children died while some were rescued. 

·         Are these private schools really approved, registered and regulated by government?

·         Before a school is sited, are there not supposed to be guidelines that must be met?

·         When we see school buses that are in very bad condition conveying children to school, can we really stop the buses and call for government sanctions. If we call, will government duly respond?

·         Who inspects the safety of the school environment?

·         Shouldn't we parents inspect properly and carry out a safety and security search before sending out children and wards for admission into such schools?

·         Who checks the conditions of the children living in boarding houses?

·         What about the issue of food safety?

·         Are there sanctions? If yes, who sanctions and to what extent?

·         Who reviews the quality and lifestyle checks of school owners and the teaches alike?

·         Child assault and violence against children, what do they mean to parents?

·         Do parents measure what they get with what they pay for?

·         Is there an agency responsible to receiving parent's complaints?

Many questions begging for answers.

If the future we hope for must be better than what we currently have, then the need to look inward schools is a strong imperative of everyone including the machinery of government irrespective of political differences. This is the future. 

Parents pay so much and for these services and hurting them having collected their hard earned money is a disservice and a criminal act. A story of another family who sent their 3 months old son to a creche, they have such a heart touching story to share on how their son was manhandled in the creche and how the boy eventually died. 

Both parents work and they had to send their 3 months old son to creche, they drop him on their way to work and pick him while returning from work. This fateful day, they picked the child home after work and in the middle of the night, the child started crying uncontrollably with running temperature and they tried managing him till about 5.00am when they had to rush him to a hospital where the boy's uncle works. Immediately they got in, they admitted the boy into an intensive care unit without delay, they battled endlessly to save his life. The Doctor came out of the ICU much later and told the father of the boy, "this is a very serious case, the boy has a damage in his brain". Obviously, this boy must have fallen while in creche and hit his head and the incident was never reported to the parents yet the boy was under a creche paid for by a labouring parent. May God bless the soul of that little boy who eventually died out of human negligence in what was trusted in to their care.

I am sure many of us have read the stories i had published on the incident that involved my son and a daughter of another family who lost their lovely daughter called Morenike under same negligence www.facebook.com/changingtheworldnetwork.

We all cannot keep quiet and allow such evil to prevail, we have put up a social movement called "Movement Against Negligence In Schools" (MANIS)  it is non government and non profit social movement and we are calling on all parents and interest groups to identify with this movement, lend their voices, file in complaints, it must not be your child but when you speak out for some person's child, angel will watch over your own.

Go to our facebook page and like it www.facebook.com/groups/advocacyforchildsafetyatschools and www.facebook.com/changingtheworldnetwork we are using both pages for this change.

Please publish your stories in these pages and let's put energy together on this issues and ensure we stop these wrongs.

ehi@ohsm.com.ng

STOP FOOD WASTE: THE FUTURE IS AT RISK, THINK 2050

There has been growing concern globally on the way we live in different regions across the world and the global crisis that looms if current individual and collective actions are not corrected.

Food waste or food loss is any food material that is discarded or unable to be used. In the context of this presentation, we will need to refer to this as not been used judiciously. It is also important to note that food waste comes in chain and in cycles which affect every region of the world in line with their lifestyles, standard and local belief systems.

Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year (approximately 1.3 billion tonnes) gets lost or wasted. This is an alarming loss percentage that we all should get worried about and understand food is not just the cost of the food wasted; but cost of other variables in both direct and indirect cost. 

Every year, consumers in rich and developed countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes). If this volume of food wasted can be saved, it means it could almost feed a sub-region in Africa for a whole year and this gives me a whole lot of reasons to get even worried the more. 222 million tonnes of food waste is no joke.

In developing countries food waste and losses occur mainly at early stages of the food value chain and can be traced back to financial, managerial and technical constraints in harvesting techniques as well as storage and cooling facilities. This is a peculiar food waste control gap that is peculiar to developing countries but this can be strengthened if farmers and food producers can have the confidence and support of government through investment in infrastructures such as good storage facilities, transportation for moving food and food products, expansion of food and packaging industries, reliable electricity, all these put together can reduce considerably the amount of food loss and waste. Invariably, the food waste in developing countries is more in the production chain than in consumerism.

This does not ultimately rule out the fact that we also have food waste at the consumer’s stage in developing countries. This is mostly associated with cultural belief systems and life style of the people. I live in Nigeria in Africa where visitors must be fed before they leave irrespective of whether they are truly hungry or not. We most times serve such visitors more than enough food that they could ever finish, we end up having leftovers that may never be eaten but thrown to the dust bin. What we need to know is that as we are busy wasting those food, there are millions of children across the world that have no food to eat and languishing in malnutrition. Food is too good to be wasted, we need to stop this trend and we need to reduce food waste now so we can prepare for possible future food shortage.

  

In medium and high income countries, food is wasted and lost mainly at later stages in the supply chain. Differing from the situation in developing countries, the behavior of consumers plays a huge part in industrialized countries. This dynamics could be seen to have some underlying social economic status factors, people shop for and most times cook more food than they need and bulk of these food never get to the dinner table. 

Most potent way of dealing with food waste is to reduce its creation. Consumers can reduce their food waste output at points-of-purchase and in their homes by adopting some simple measures good enough to stop food waste no matter how small. This includes planning when shopping for food and spontaneous purchases are shown as often the most wasteful. Proper knowledge of food storage reduces foods becoming inedible and thrown away, infrastructures also play a key role in this direction.

In the United States 30% of all food, worth US$48.3 billion, is thrown away each year. It is estimated that about half of the water used to produce this food also goes to waste, since agriculture is the largest human use of water (70%). (Jones, 2004 cited in Lundqvist et al., 2008). 

United Kingdom households waste an estimated 6.7 million tonnes of food every year, around one third of the 21.7 million tonnes purchased. This means that approximately 32% of all food purchased per year is not eaten. Most of the food waste (4.1 million tonnes) is avoidable and could have been eaten had it been better managed (WRAP, 2008; Knight and Davis, 2007).

 

In the USA, organic waste is the second highest component of landfills, which are the largest source of methane emissions. Methane is one of the most harmful greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. Methane is 23 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. The vast amount of food going to landfills makes a significant contribution to global warming, this clearly states that the impact of food waste has both environmental effect through the use of chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides, more fuel used for transportation, land use and cost of all these which has an overall financial impact. 

We also need to consider other associated impact food waste has on water. We already know that agriculture already has the largest human use of water which is put at 70% (around 550 billion cubic metres of water is used to grow crops that never reach the dinner table), before we waste food we should also think of the impact this waste is going to have on water also.

In a document released by Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) “Food Waste Footprint” it was stated that under current production and consumption trends, global food production must increase 60% by 2050 in order to meet the demands of the growing world population. The current world population of 7.2 billion is projected to increase by 1 billion over the next 12 years and reach 9.6 billion by 2050. This means by 2050, we have an extra 2.4 billion mouths to feed and this will also place more demand on water needed for food production.

Food waste comes in different stages and cycles which range from:

• Food waste in harvesting processes which is more in mechanised farming
• Food waste through economic factors such as regulation and standard which leads to selective harvest that leaves food that does not meet market standard unharvested and left to waste in the farm.
• Food waste through processing otherwise known as post harvest loss with loss ration relatively unknown and difficult to estimate
• We also have a level of food waste in post harvest stage and this is more evident in storage. This loss is classified into two namely:

1. Quantitative loss: This loss is attributed to pest and micro-organisms that affect the stored food which leads to reduction in quantity eventually available for human consumption.
2. Qualitative loss: This is more in areas that have a combination of ambient heat and humidity which encourages the breeding of pest and micro-organism. This reduces the nutritional value, caloric value and edibility of crops. In a market that has standard and effective regulation, this food could also be affected and perhaps have little or no market value and ultimately disposed as waste.

• We also experience high level of food waste through retail stores where large quantities of food are thrown away. Usually, this consists of items that have reached their either best before, sell-by or use-by dates. These foods are destroyed by retail stores. It is important to note, these retails stores also shift the food waste to consumers by sales strategy on products with low shelve life or about to expire. Such strategies include 50% price reduction or buy-one-get-one-free, this attracts buyers to buy more than they need or buy what they do not even need which ends up most times as waste in dust bins.
• Suppliers to retail stores also produce or stock more food and food products than would be needed for supply to these stores based on contractual agreement, the excess that are perishable are afterwards thrown away.

When we weigh issue of food waste in several balances it does not favour the world in any way and changing the trend needs individual contribution. You need to take a personal pledge while I take mine irrespective of the part of the world we differently live in, we need to stand for this and conscientiously adopt food saving strategies for the sake of the future of the world. Children in different parts of the world are ravaged by poverty and hunger, the absence of relative peace due to widespread of wars and regional conflicts across Africa and some other parts of developing regions also lead to a number of children being orphaned. We also need to understand the concept of globalization which has removed trans-border barrier which leads to ease of migration by citizens of different countries that are either hit by national conflict or poverty. There are currently 9.7 million worldwide refugees according to United Nations High Commission for Refugee and these people take refuge in different countries or cities and remember we need food to feed this mass of people. 

When you take a position to contribute to the global campaign against food waste in your country and we all do same in our different countries, we would make the world a better place. No one individual can do this alone, when we all come together it means we all have the strength to make it work. If one can save a plate of meal to feed one and another saves a plate of meal to feed another, we will together be able to feed our growing population through the collective efforts of you and I. This is the way forward; it is the right thing to do.

Take a stand today and make it count, our collective decision is an investment for a sustainable global population.

References:

http://www.fao.org/nr/sustainability/food-loss-and-waste/en/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste

http://www.unep.org/wed/quickfacts/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoCVrkcaH6Q

 

Kindly read and leave a comment.

ehi@ohsm.com.ng