How can people suffer from jiggers in the present age?

Dec 01, 2002

SIR— I read with astonishment the article in your November 8 edition about Busoga Kingdom disposing of faecal matter equivalent to 56 tons in the bush per annum

SIR— I read with astonishment the article in your November 8 edition about Busoga Kingdom disposing of faecal matter equivalent to 56 tons in the bush per annum. Before recovering from this shocking news, the Minister of State (Energy), Mr Daudi Migereko, added insult to injury when at Nyenya Primary School decried the number of pupils with jiggers and appealed to donor organisations to go in combat with wananchi against this menace of tundra petrans (jiggers), according to The New Vision of November 11.
While some people are going
to the moon at this point,
some Ugandan communities have no pit-latrines and still suffer from archaic diseases such as jiggers! But to have no latrine or suffer from jiggers is not a result of poverty but ignorance, laziness and backwardness.
Riddance of jiggers, if we have to await cement donations, will take a long time. However, smearing classroom floors with cow dung once or twice a month by the pupils themselves reduces the habitat for the fleece (jigger origin). This method used to be the case in the olden days when most schools in the country were not cemented and even when the majority of pupils had no shoes.
The faeces problem could and should be tackled by invoking the 1935 Public Health Ordinance, which among other things, emphasizes cleanliness of the individual and his habitat. There is absolutely no reason why able-bodied residents of Busoga Kingdom (and other parts of Uganda) cannot dig a pit and build a latrine and box their excreta there.
I suggest the Busoga Kingdom health minister acts ex cathedra and gets rid of the two menaces. Otherwise, the whole world will laugh its head off when it learns that Ugandans who have been able to fight HIV/AIDS, litter their excreta in the bush and walk with jiggers as part of their body property.
Remember, health, like charity, begins at home and is only repaired in health institutions.

Dr Myers Lugemwa
Hon Gen Secretary
Uganda Medical Association

Related story:
Muloki Opens Pit Latrine Campaign

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