•This comes barely one week after the Health Ministry announced an outbreak of cholera in Nairobi’s Kamukunji area.
•The outbreak was attributed to failure by Kenyans to adhere to simple hygienic measures such as washing of hands.
Image: CHARLENE MALWA
Investing in basic and cost effective infection prevention and control measures such as hand-washing can reduce common diseases by up to 70 per cent.
World Health organization in its first ever global report on infection, prevention and control states that despite glaring evidence that appropriate hand hygiene can save lives, compliance with hand hygiene especially during health care delivery remains low.
This comes barely one week after the Ministry of Health announced an outbreak of cholera in Nairobi’s Kamukunji area.
The outbreak was attributed to failure by Kenyans to adhere to the simple hygienic measures such as washing of hands.
“Because sanitising is out in some cases, because people are no longer wearing masks and so on, cholera is back in case you did not know, we have a bit of an outbreak of cholera in Kamukunji,” Health CS Mutahi Kagwe said.
“I have absolutely no doubt at the height of the Covid-19 days there would have been no cholera because everyone would have been washing their hands and sanitising,” the CS added.
WHO now notes that at least 15 in every 100 patients admitted in critical care are likely to acquire an infection during hospital stay with at least one in every 10 affected patients dying from the same.
The advent of Covid-19 has seen a silver lining in the midst of the dark cloud after the ministry pointed out that despite the challenges on the healthcare system there had been commendable community behavior change with people increasing their hand hygiene.
As a result, the country significantly reduced killer diseases such as diarrhoea diseases among children aged below five years, acute respiratory diseases in all age sets and intestinal worms among school age children.
According to the global health agency, people in intensive care and newborns are particularly at risk.
“The report reveals that approximately one in four hospital-treated sepsis cases and almost half of all cases of sepsis with organ dysfunction treated in adult intensive-care units are health care-associated,” WHO notes.
WHO DG Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus says that the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed many challenges, and gaps in infection prevention and control in all regions and countries, including those which had the most advanced IPC programmes.
“It has also provided an unprecedented opportunity to take stock of the situation and rapidly scale up outbreak readiness and response through infection prevention and control practices,” Ghebreyesus said.
The report notes that despite the surge in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, not all essential IPC human resources, supplies and products are available two years into the pandemic.
A previous WASH report released last year identified that 1.8 billion people globally were using health care facilities that lacked basic water services and 800 million people were using facilities with no toilets.
In the least developed countries, the situation is especially acute.
An estimated 50 per cent of health care facilities lacked basic water supplies, 63 per cent lacked basic sanitation services, 26 per cent lacked hand hygiene facilities at points of care while 60 per cent of health care facilities did not have systems to safely manage health-care waste.