Soap must, not used:Daily Star

Farhana Alam knows very well that washing hands with soap before meals and after using toilet is a must for good health. She always washes her hands with soap after using the toilet, but not all the time before meals. "I usually wash hands just with water before meals or feeding the children," says Alam, mother of two and a university graduate living in Dhaka. However, her four-year-old child is u
nderweight. At this age, the kid should be weighed 15 to 16 kilograms, but he is only some 13 kilograms though his diet is quite good, said the worried mother, adding that he gets fever four to five times a year, if not diarrhoea. Dr Mohsin Ali, a nutrition specialist at the Unicef, said washing hands without soap is of no use, and over 90 percent of people in the country do not wash hands with soaps before having meals. He said studies have found a direct link between poor hygiene practices and malnutrition. 40 percent of 15 million children below five in Bangladesh are underweight, he added. Among other factors, undernutrition occurs because of recurrent diarrhoea and pneumonia of the children, Ali said on the eve of World Handwashing Day today being observed in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world. If children or their caregivers do not wash hands with soaps before meals, it is likely that bacteria or viruses transmit to their bodies and cause infections that finally lead to malnutrition, he added. Advertisement "Malnutrition seriously hampers cognitive development of children," said Khairul Islam, country representative of WaterAid, which promotes hygiene, water and sanitation services among the poor in Bangladesh. Bangladesh has reduced the mortality rate of children under five by 71 percent since 1990, but the situation is bleak in terms of sanitation and child nutrition. According to the Local Government Division of the LGRD Ministry, the use of sanitary latrine in Bangladesh has gone up to 97 percent now from 33 percent in 2003 when the country first started sanitation programme. However, Bangladesh National Hygiene Baseline Survey 2014 found only 35 percent schools have handwashing facilities with water and soap, and only one-third of students' hands appeared clean. Over 80 percent menstruating girls and women use old cloths for menstruation management and less than 25 percent of them wash clothes properly, it said. About a third of restaurants in the country have soap and water at handwashing locations for staff, but soap is used in only a few instances. The instances of washing hands by food vendors too are very few, the survey says. All these lead to certain infections that cause illness and even deaths. Infections caused by such practices are not known, but Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS)-2011 found diarrhoea accounts for 2 percent and acute respiratory infections like pneumonia account for one-fifth of all under-5 child deaths. A survey by the World Bank and icddr,b in 2011 calculated that Bangladesh incurs a financial loss of 5.3 percent of its GDP a year due to inadequacy of sanitation and hygiene facilities. These losses could be greatly reduced as the national hygiene survey 2014 says 99 percent of diarrhoea, 90 percent of dysentery and 51 percent worms can be checked just by providing safe drinking water, sanitation systems and proper washing of hands. The environmental hazards, mainly air and water pollution, are the major problems in Bangladesh, said Dr Khairul Islam. "Therefore, we must turn sanitation and hygiene into a social movement to save our children from malnutrition. Otherwise, we as a nation would fail to go forward," Khairul said.