The Oti Regional Environmental Health Directorate, is making frantic efforts to ensure that residents strictly adhere to good environmental health practices that would enable them keep their environment clean with emphasis on the need to stop open defecation.
This is to ensure that diseases such as malaria and typhoid would not become a major health threat in the region.
As a result, the Environmental Health Officer, Madam Sybil Boison, has initiated an educational programme for the people at the capital Dambai, which would be replicated in all the districts, to appreciate the need to keep the environment clean at all times.
Also, as well as not to regard the banks of the river as a rubbish dump site, which, she noted, had serious health implications if they did not refrain from the negative act.
The Health Director, who spoke in an interview with this paper at Dambai, explained that the Oti River served as a major source of water for the residents of Dambai and other communities along the river, but unfortunately, the residents were polluting the water body.
She, therefore, initiated an educational programme at Dambai to create awareness about the dangers involved in such unfriendly environmental practices.
Madam Boison observed that major drains in the Dambai township and the market were all directed to the Oti River, where most residents used the gutters as refuse dumps, and that any time it rained the rubbish was washed into the river.
She stressing that whenever she mobilised her staff and Zoomlion workers to clean the bank of the river at Dambai, the same rubbish would be seen engulfing the beaches when it rained.
She said the situation was very alarming, therefore, the only remedy was regular education to help change the attitudes of the people.
Adding that the people should adopt best environmental practices that would make them adhere to safe ways of disposing of refuse, as well as build private toilet facilities at home to help bring to an end open defecation.
The Director continued that apart from polluting the banks of the river, plastic materials also affects aquatic life.
Her outfit had also noted that residents also constructed public toilets along the river and that some were collapsing, resulting in the waste water being washed into the river any tine it overflowed its banks during the rains.
Madam Boison, who was just a few months old in the region as the Environmental Health Director, noted that her observation so far showed that residents at Dambai had to pay before patronising the public toilets, which made many of them adopt open defecation.
Therefore, the best thing to do was to encourage them to own private toilets at home through public education.
She said Dambai, being the regional capital and sited along the Oti River, ought to be kept clean at all times, therefore, her office had started general education on environmental hygiene.
According to her, the rich should help the poor in the management of environmental health related issues, particularly in the provision of household toilet facilities, because the activities of the poor would largely affect all, including the rich, and that diseases would not discriminate against people based on their status in society.
Madam Boison mentioned Global Communities, a non-governmental organization operating in the area of environmental protection and sanitation, and appealed to other non-governmental organisations to extend their activities to the Oti Region to help bring the needed development.
Another issue the Oti Regional Health raised was the absence of a slaughter house in Dambai and the region as animals were killed by individuals and sold in the open under unhygienic conditions.
This development, she said, called for the construction of one at the regional capital and all the districts to ensure that meat provided to the public for consumption would be prepared under hygienic condition.
Madam Boison commended a volunteer at Dambai who always swept the banks of River Oti, adding that her outfit would plant trees along the banks of the river to provide shades for passengers in transit to be ferried across the river.
She urged vehicle owners to collaborate with her office in planting trees to make the regional capital the most beautiful in the country.
She, however, observed that the absence of a vehicle at the regional office to make her mobile was a major challenge confronting smooth operation in the region, as she depends on commercial transport to carry out her activities.
Madam Boison, who was the former Volta Regional Director of the same office, was transferred to the Oti Region when it was created, called on stakeholders to effectively collaborate with her office to promote environmental hygiene across the region, which was vital in ensuring high productivity since it goes with sound health.
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