Health, and agriculture ministries should get closer
What you need to know:
- If we eat dirty or poisoned food we fall sick. Kenya claims that the maize from Uganda has aflatoxins which, according to health authorities, cause cancer and liver damage among other health issues.
The ongoing saga about Kenya’s rejection of allegedly contaminated maize from Uganda and Tanzania ought to open our eyes to the important things we had ignored to take into consideration given that the food we grow and consume is linked to human health.
If we eat dirty or poisoned food we fall sick. Kenya claims that the maize from Uganda has aflatoxins which, according to health authorities, cause cancer and liver damage among other health issues.
Aflatoxins, if they exist in Ugandan maize, could possibly be accountable for the increasing cancer and liver damage cases here in Uganda since as a country we consume 60 per cent of the maize we produce.
We are trying hard to expand the cancer wards in our hospitals when in fact we should also be educating our farmers about the best ways to avoid formation of aflatoxins in the maize and the other crops that they grow and consume.
We seem to be paying more attention to promoting agricultural production and poverty alleviation than to hygienic food handling and nutrition education. It is not enough to teach farmers how to grow high-yielding beans or groundnuts or cassava for sale to get out of poverty.
The farmers also need information about the nutritional values of the crops they produce, how to preserve the nutrients, and in what amounts to eat them for good health.
They also have to learn about the common causes of food poisoning, the health hazards associated with bad post-harvest practices, and the high risk of food contamination resulting from usage of animal manure and rotting organic matter for soil fertility.
Malnutrition is described as a situation when nutrition intake is too low or too much. It is a big health burden to Uganda costing the country $899m annually, according to the Global Hunger Report 2013.
One therefore wonders why countries such as Uganda where about 75 percent of the population practices farming suffer from low nutrition. Undernourished people have low disease resistance and frequent visitors to health facilities.
Mr Michael Ssali is a veteran journalist,
[email protected]
