Your Excellency, Please Save Environmental Health Before It Is Too Late

Your Excellency Hon. Peter mbah

I am writing this letter not merely as someone seeking employment, but as someone deeply concerned about the health of the people you have sworn to protect.

There is a profession in Nigeria that works largely behind the scenes, yet its absence can be felt everywhere. That profession is ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH.

Environmental Health Officers are trained to prevent disease before people become patients. We inspect food premises, markets, schools, slaughterhouses, warehouses and public places. We work in sanitation, waste management, food safety, water safety, vector control and environmental disease prevention.

Yet Your Excellency, there is a painful contradiction. While our environmental challenges continue to increase, many trained Environmental Health Officers remain unemployed or underutilised and this is not merely an employment problem. It is a PUBLIC-HEALTH PROBLEM.

We are increasingly seeing government agencies taking up areas that overlap with Environmental Health functions, including waste management and other environmental responsibilities.

Your Excellency, we are not against government agencies or collaboration, but where professional Environmental Health knowledge is required, let the professionals trained for the job be properly utilised because while agencies are being created, trained Environmental Health Officers are sitting at home.

Meanwhile:
👉 Who is adequately monitoring our food premises to ensure that food prepared and served to citizens is safe for consumption?

👉 Who is inspecting our markets to ensure that foodstuffs are properly stored, handled and sold under hygienic conditions?

👉 Who is monitoring our slaughterhouses to ensure that meat and other animal products released for public consumption are safe and fit for consumption?

👉 Who is inspecting our schools and public premises to ensure that our children and citizens are living, learning and carrying out their activities in safe and healthy environments?

👉 Who is responding to and following up on environmental-health complaints to ensure that identified hazards are properly addressed?

👉 Who is adequately monitoring warehouses, shops and other premises where unsafe, adulterated or counterfeit products may be stored or sold to unsuspecting members of the public?

Recently, people of Enugu State were confronted with a disturbing reported incident involving a food handler and alleged human body parts.

Whatever the final facts of that particular case may be, it raises an important question: How many dangerous practices are happening in places where there are simply not enough Environmental Health Officers to see them?Public health cannot depend on someone accidentally discovering a dangerous practice and reporting it. PREVENTION MUST BE DELIBERATE. If we have enough Environmental Health Officers on the ground, there will be more regular inspections, more monitoring, more investigations and more opportunities to identify hazards before they become tragedies.

Your Excellency, imagine every Local Government having adequate Environmental Health personnel.
👉 More eyes on our markets.
👉 More inspections of food premises.
👉 Better monitoring of waste management.
👉 Better supervision of slaughterhouses.
👉 Better attention to school sanitation.
👉 Better environmental surveillance.
👉 More prevention.

This is why I respectfully appeal to your administration to conduct a proper Environmental Health manpower assessment across the State.
👉 Find out how many officers we have.
👉 How many are needed.
👉 How many have retired.
👉 Which Local Government Areas are understaffed.

Then RECRUIT, REPLACE, DEPLOY AND EQUIP.

Your Excellency, we are not asking the government to employ us simply because we need salaries. We are asking the government to employ us because the people need the services we were trained to provide.

Every Environmental Health Officer working is another professional pair of eyes protecting the public, another person preventing hazards, another person protecting food, another person monitoring sanitation, another person helping to keep disease away from our communities. Because when Environmental Health is strong, hospitals have fewer preventable cases to deal with.

Your Excellency, please do not allow Environmental Health to gradually become a forgotten profession while the environmental challenges facing our people continue to grow.

Please save Environmental Health before it is too late, the professionals are here, the communities need us.

What we need now is GOVERNMENT ACTION.

Respectfully,
Nnebedum Sylvia Ezinwanne (A Concerned Environmental Health Professional)