The article I choose this week focuses on Nigeria where recent heavy rains have caused severe flooding. The flooding is risking health for the people of Nigeria due to the many outside toilets they have. With such dirty water Nigeria is having the worst Cholera outbreak in years. The article goes on to state that according to UNICEF 2,500 people have dies this year alone spreading across 25 of Nigeria’s states. To make matters worse it seems as if the government officials aren’t trying to assist with the flood recovery. Joy Jolly was one of the people that the reporter interviewed and he mentioned “the government just eats the money, keeps it to themselves”. Nigeria’s own will never get to reap the benefits of their oil filled lands.
First off I would like to touch on the global issue on cholera. Again this disease is very treatable and easy to stay away from however it affects the poor countries the most. Cholera is caused by an bacteria called Vibrio Cholerae. People are affected by this bacteria by consuming water with containing it. Unless treated in a reasonable amount of time the disease can become deadly. Science in Africa stated that the epidemic now hitting South Africa has been going on since August 2000. The problem is that there are no clean safe drinking water in Nigeria, or in most developing countries for that matter. According to WHO there are 3-5 million cases and 100,000-120,000 deaths from this disease every year. There is no reason why there are so many cases when this disease can easily be avoided, which leads me to my next point. The fact that government officials aren’t willing to provide their citizens with safe and clean drinking water and food shows how low people can be. Here we have a disease which wouldn’t even be an “epidemic” in South Africa had we leaders who thought about people other than themselves. Anytime we have thousands of people dying from treatable diseases, this becomes a social issue.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs107/en/index.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/floods-lap-again-across-nigeria-as-governments-remain-inept-raising-risk-of-cholera-death/2011/10/26/gIQA0Vx1IM_story.html
2 comments:
This is a tragic event! I cannot fathom not having clean, safe drinking water. How can the government get away with this? It really does show how self centered people can be.
This article show that corruptness of some of the governments around the world.
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