The Lagos State government has attributed the surge in the spread of the cholera epidemic in the state to indiscriminate consumption of unregistered tiger-nut drinks.
The Special Adviser to the Lagos State Governor on Health, Dr Kemi Ogunyemi, disclosed this in an interview with the Punch, published on Saturday.
She said it was discovered after the Environmental Health Services officials from the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Environment had gone to the affected areas to conduct investigations.
“We carried out a survey and found that the common denominator, which was one of the deadly factors, was a tiger nut drink. People who came to the hospitals all identified that they had drunk tiger-nut drinks.
“People who came to the hospitals all identified that they had drunk tiger- nut drinks. We couldn’t just take their word for it, so we had to take that drink and test it to see what was in it. We immediately sent people out to look for those selling it so we could take a sample.
“We found empty bottles with a name on them, but we discovered that it wasn’t even registered with the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, the regulatory body that ensures the safety of consumables. There was a phone number and a name on the bottle, and we started tracing.
“We did contact tracing, similar to what we did with COVID-19. We combed the area to ask people where they got the drinks from. We couldn’t find any full bottles. We only found empty ones, which were of no use because we could not test them.
“The phone number on the bottle was not reachable. From our investigations, we realised that the beverages were not registered, so the producers hadn’t gone through the processes to ensure that what they were producing was safe for the public to consume. We traced it to that.
“Of course, cholera is also water-borne, so we took samples of the water to test it. The bottom line is that we took stool samples because different things cause diarrhoea. It could be anything else. We found out that it was confirmed cholera, specifically Vibrio cholera subtype 01, which is the most infectious and aggressive type,” she explained.
She listed open defecation, rainy season, flooding, contaminated water sources and poor sanitation practices as some of the factors that trigger cholera outbreaks. Added that the government would not relent in raising awareness and encouraging people to wash their hands regularly.
