‘Health crisis looms in Ogun’

The Environmental Health Officers Registration Council of Nigeria has warned of a looming health crisis in Ogun State.

EHORCN also vowed to embark on the arrest and prosecution of sanitation marshals used by state governments during the monthly environmental sanitation exercise.

The council accused the local and state governments of employing quacks as health officers, alleging that environmental health services had drastically deteriorated in the country due to this trend.

The Registrar of the council, Mr. Augustine Ebisike, said this during a training programme, organised for registered environmental officers in Nigeria.

While speaking at the programme in Abeokuta on Monday, Ebisike wondered why states and local governments in the nation had for many years placed a restriction on employment of environmental health officers.

He stated that the situation was worse in Ogun, where he said majority of the environmental health officers were now near retirement age.

The registrar lamented that in spite of the abundance of EHOs in the state, the government had failed to employ them.

Ebisike noted that the common diseases that had continued to ravage some parts of the country, including Ogun, were more of environmental than medical challenge.

He explained that Ogun, which no longer employs EHOs and where majority of the existing ones would soon retire, risked a health crisis.

He said, “In Ogun State for example, the picture is as bad as it is nationally. We have a total of 237 environmental health officers on the register from the state out of which 107 are above 50 years of age. Seventy are between30 to 35 years of age and none is below 30 years of age. It may interest you to know that the last employment of environmental health officers in Ogun State was in 2006.

“What this data show is that if nothing is done to recruit younger officers in the state services in the next five years, the profession may lose up to 80 per cent of the number on the register presently and this will exacerbate a situation that is already in crisis.”

The council’s registrar however blamed the current situation on the state and local governments, which he accused of engaging quacks as health officers.

Punch