Create Our Environment Health for Life

Building houses has always been a continuous phenomenon and something that is associated with living beings (animals, especially man). In the case of man, experiences have shown that the way we design and build our houses can affect our physical/environmental and mental health. Designing and building healthy houses can improve the quality of life for all people who live, work, worship, learn, and play within their borders – where every person is free to make choices amid a variety of healthy, available, accessible, and affordable options.

In other words, efforts should always be made to build houses where there would be access to safe water, adequate sanitation, and proper hygiene education in order to reduce illness and death from disease, leading to improved health, poverty reduction, and socio-economic development.

However, many countries are challenged to provide these basic necessities to their populations, leaving people at risk for water, sanitation, and hygiene-related diseases. Experts have said that water, sanitation and hygiene have the potential to prevent at least 9.1% of the global disease burden and 6.3% of all deaths. In the world today, a good number of people do not have access to an improved water source making it difficult for them to live a healthy life. Many more obtain their drinking water from improved, but microbiologically unsafe, sources.

It may seem very difficult to identify all the environmental causes of chronic diseases, yet measuring the amounts of hazardous substances in our environment in a standard way, tracing the spread of these over time and area, seeing how they show up in human tissues, and understanding how they may cause illness is critical. The government and the Non-Governmental agencies that work on environmental matters can be the start of that system. Since construction of buildings in sanitary manners is an important aspect of Public Health, and houses built without consideration to sanitary can lead to many hazards, then all building plans should be made to pass through Environmental Officers for study before they are built. Also, the land department should always seek help from the Health Workers before new sites for buildings are given out to the general public.

Overcrowding and inadequate ventilation and lighting are some of the regulations in building to be considered. It is because of these that the government through the government area health offices should give approval to all the building plans of the people that meet up with the environmental requirements. Before approval, health personnel must be satisfied that the buildings will be sanitary in condition and that other hazards cannot occur in them later. In this building plan, location of rooms and their numbers, location of kitchens, stores and sitting rooms are all included with the number of windows and doors to be provided.

It is amazing that most of the lands being allocated by the individuals are not given out with the help of Health Inspectors because in these areas, consideration is not given to the nature of soil, dampness and its healthiness. It is expected that Health Officials should inspect building sites before construction begins. However, to ensure that only sanitary buildings are considered, Health agencies must not compromise their duty but must adhere to the system of integrated health, exposure, and hazard information and data from all quarters.

By Vitus Ejiogu