The poisons we live with
The phenomenon is an existential threat to public health, which, like in every other aspect of our national life, government has proved its gross incompetence in handling. No food item in Nigeria is safe from poisonous contamination. They include, but are not limited to meat, beans, chicken, fish, palm oil, yam, beverages and ripening of fruits with carbide.
A study on foods in Lagos and Kano, the two most populous cities in the country, by the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, revealed a high level of poisonous food contamination at the point of consumption. The FAO Country Representative, Nigeria, represented by Alphonsus Onwuemeka, during a World Food Safety Day event, jointly organised with the ministries of Health and Agriculture on June 7, said that “aflatoxins, mycotoxins, heavy metals such as lead and pesticide residues,” are much in evidence. This is quite alarming.
On June 5 — World Environmental Day — the Abuja Environmental Protection Board visited an abattoir in Karu, a suburb of the FCT, to plead with the operators to desist from using disused tyres to roast meat being prepared for public consumption because of its resultant dangerous environmental pollution. It was a feeble official response to a disaster, which showed that Nigeria still has a long way to go in public health law enforcement. Dark smoke billowed and turned the skyline into a massive fog.
Such brazen breach of public health goes on in practically every abattoir in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Aba, Calabar and other towns across the country. A tyre contains carcinogenic chemical substances or cancer-causing agents — benzene, butadiene, benzo (a) pyrene — which easily permeate the roasted meat. Plastic materials with similar toxic elements are also used.
A public health hazard, which Abuja residents are exposed to, either from food or environmental perspective, is not resolved through appeasement, but by the enforcement of the law. It is only such that could send a strong and enduring message in a society that now breeds outlaws in geometric proportions.
Whether in Abuja, Lagos or elsewhere, the use of tyres is not the only health challenge. The veterinary doctors are few or non-existent, the abattoirs are filthy, no clean water, and human and animal waste litters the environment. A reporter who visited the popular Oko-Oba abattoir in Agege area of Lagos, in 2017, interacted with the Vets and a director of one of the private abattoirs who told her, “You don’t expect seven veterinarians to inspect 3,000 cattle slaughtered daily. It’s a 24-hour job because they might slaughter at night, but those are emergency slaughtering done for weak or sick animals. The doctors are not enough.”
Exposed more to carbon from tyre burns is animal skin — called ponmo in local parlance — eaten by both the rich and the poor. All states public health agencies should have a hands-on approach in monitoring the operation of abattoirs to ensure that facilities that will help them observe public health standards are in place.
The risk Nigerians face with meat is the same for other foodstuffs. Some ignorant beans sellers use Sniper, a poisonous insecticide (which many have used to commit suicide), to preserve them from being infested by weevils. Not a few families have been wiped out after meals from such beans. Late last year, a video of a beans seller spraying the insecticide on his beans went viral. Family meals from yam flour (amala) and rice in Kwara and Anambra states respectively, led to their total extermination.
Sicknesses traceable to toxins from contaminated foods include cancer, kidney diseases, cardio-vascular complications, heart-related ailments, diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid and botulism. WHO says Nigeria recorded 41,000 cancer deaths in 2018, out of an estimated 166,000 cases.
What is more, the food items Nigerians regularly eat, but hardly suspect of being poisonous, are frequently being barred from Europe and other parts of the world. They include beans, yam, melon used for egusi soup, palm oil, shelled groundnut, pumpkin and bitter leaf (vegetables). The European Union barred 42 of such items in 2015. The EU officials said that these food items contained high level chemicals, like dichlorvas, diometrate and trichlorphon. The food items might have been endangered during preservation or through wrong application of fertiliser during farming. Rodents’ excreta, dead insects and glass fragments add to the foreign objects the EU noticed.
Paradoxically, because of lax import policies, corruption and abject failure in law enforcement, our land and sea borders are often open to the influx of poisonous food materials from other countries. For instance, a consignment of 3,028 cartons of rotten fish imported from Asia was uncovered in 2014. Frozen poultry products preserved with formaldehyde, which is also carcinogenic, often find their way to our markets.
As ministry officials noted, many Nigerians eat at least one meal a day outside their homes, much of which is prepared by the roadsides and gutters that waft faecal odours and other maladorous emissions. In 2018, the police in Lagos uncovered a make-shift wine factory with 4,000 bottles, labelled for sale and drums of chemicals. In well-organised societies, the authorities would go beyond this, trace the products to the distribution points, find some people who might have consumed the illicit product and subject them to vital medical examination to know the level of damage already done.
So slack are regulation and enforcement that many adulterated beverages, bottled, sachet waters and bread bearing approval numbers of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control are everywhere. Regrettably, NAFDAC has not been as active and reliable as it was under the late indomitable Dora Akunyili. Government should get its priority right. The confession by the current NAFDAC DG, Moji Adeyeye, that 80 per cent of the equipment used for certifying foods and drugs had broken down and the zero score rating its Lagos laboratory received from the WHO in 2017 are issues the Ministry of Health, particularly the ministers under whose tenure this absurdity occurred, deserve to be jeered.
This malady should be reversed without delay. The revelations by local and international authorities so far demand total war on public health enforcement. At the state level, relevant agencies should justify their existence by consistently monitoring and ensuring that the law prevails against crooked elements. Indeed, nobody is safe.
(PUNCH)
