Need To Intensify Vector Control Services In Nig

Need To Intensify Vector Control Services In Nig

Obviously, one of the actions governments the world over take towards protecting the health of their citizens bothers on the need to ensure that vectors which bring about illnesses to the populace are controlled.

Under this, insects such as flies, cockroaches, bedbugs, centipedes, scorpions, wasps, bees and, the worst of them, mosquitoes that bring about illness through their bites, deposition of germs on food items or through their stings are controlled and prevented.

Particularly, the menace of malaria in Nigeria has always posed a big problem to public health.

The presence of malaria anywhere is wholly attributed to the parasites deposited into the human blood cells by a specie of mosquitoes called anopheles.

Apart from malaria, flies generally bring about illness to man.

This they do by depositing germs through their usually hairy legs and through regurgitation while perching on exposed food materials and wounds.

This apart, public health has always been affected as many people have suffered one disease condition or the other associated with snake bites, scorpion stings, bee stings, centipede contacts with the skin, cockroaches running over food items, tsetse flies’ bites as well as those of bedbugs which infest pieces of furniture and general bedding in living homes.

Under vector control services, the presence of the above-named insects and other lower animals is checked and controlled.

These control measures form an integral part of the public health services rendered to the people anywhere.

However, these very important services are nearly absent in the country, and where such services exist, they are often haphazardly executed.

This is because of the infiltration of quacks in the system as tolerated by some governments. This should not be so.

The presence of vectors and lower animals generally is controlled through routine spraying and fumigation services as should be carried out by the relevant public health professionals as led by the environmental health officers as it is one of their statutory functions as contained in the famous Public health Law.

This is where it becomes necessary to call on the environmental health officers across the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory to rise up to this challenge and perform their professional responsibility as placed on them by law in the interest of the health of the people.

In Nigeria, the three tiers of government on their own part, should always motivate the public health officers in their employ towards encouraging such officers to perform optimally always and go ahead to control the vectors that transmit diseases in the country.

The services of quacks should not be sought again in rendering vector and vermin control services anywhere in Nigeria. Indeed, government and the relevant public health professionals should close ranks and take the necessary steps towards controlling the various vectors that transmit different diseases affecting the people through their bites and stings in the interest of the health of the people.

By Ogbonnaya Akoma, Edited by Grace Namiji