Environmental health officers donate K1m sanitation materials to St Kizito, Mpemba

Malawi Environmental Health Association (Meha) has donated sanitation materials worth K 1 million to Tropical Cyclone Freddy survivors at St Kizito Primary School and Mpemba evacuation camps in Blantyre. 

Speaking when they presented the donation at St Kizito Primary School, Meha president Dr Save Kumwenda said through the materials, they want to prevent diseases from spreading in the cyclone survivors’ camps. 

“If you have such things as the cyclones and people are displaced, it means they don’t have proper sanitation facilities, they don’t have safe water supply and maybe their living conditions, including nutritional issues, they are not up to the standard that we require. 

“So, what it means is that it is very easy for people to have diseases. So, we are looking at people should have enough water. There are different diseases like skin diseases, we have other diseases like scabies and diarrhoea which are very common in camps. 

“So as environmental officers, we want to make sure that despite being displaced, it shouldn’t be a breeding ground for diseases because the diseases that can break out might kill more people than what the cyclone did,” he said.

Kumwenda also said the sanitation materials, which included chlorine, soap, disinfectants, mops, buckets and pails,  among others, were bought using contributions from the association’s nationwide membership comprising health surveillance assistants, assistant environmental health officers and environmental health officers. 

On her part, St Kizito Primary School head teacher Ruth Nambuzi thanked Meha for the donation. 

She said: “I just want to appreciate what Meha has done because we had challenges in terms of sanitation in the toilet and even when women went to draw water from the borehole, they had to go in turns because we had few buckets. Now that they have brought the buckets, and chlorine and the other materials, these will help us a great deal.”

Tropical Cyclone Freddy made a landfall on Southern Malawi on March 10, killing more than 400 people, according to the Department of Disaster Management Affairs.