Your health is your responsibility

While officiating at the closing ceremony of the mosquito net campaign recently, President Museveni made a call to households and communities to actively get involved in the fight against malaria. The Daily Monitor of March 22 reported that residents of Bundibugyo District were ‘selling off their mosquito nets for as low as Shs2,000 to hotel owners’.
The mosquito nets were provided to them free of charge by the Ministry of Health in the recently concluded ‘Chase Malaria’ campaign that benefitted more than 38 million Ugandans. Notably, Bundibugyo is among the five districts that received these nets in the last phase of the campaign.
Given the country’s high malaria burden rate at 63 per cent accounts for 25 per cent to 40 per cent monthly number of outpatient hospital visits and 20 per cent of hospital admissions among people aged between 21 and 39 years, according to 2015 survey. The disease, unfortunately, remains the leading cause of death in the country.
Imagine the impact of small prompt basic actions such as sleeping under a mosquito net every night, thoroughly washing hands after every visit to the toilet, and before having a meal. Even before you take a snack, ensure that your hands are sanitised/washed properly. Doing such small things would actually make a big difference if practised daily without fault. Besides, doing so would in turn make us richer as it would reduce our expenditure on unnecessary trips to hospital, consequently reducing the resource burden on our healthcare.
There is an urgent need for Ugandans to realise that their health is first and foremost their individual responsibility and not anyone else’s.
For instance, there are still households that do not have a pit-latrine/toilet. This is a health risk (with disease outbreaks such as diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid, etc) waiting to happen - the effects of which would be faced not only by these reckless people, but also the entire community and country as a whole.
We need to remember that our health is our responsibility and it is an everyday job to keep ourselves, loved ones and communities safe.
Ashemerierwe Aturihaihi,
[email protected]