The Ministry of National Education and Vocational Training (MENFP) Friday launched an extensive awareness campaign about the cholera epidemic in schools. The campaign aims to encourage principals, teaching staff and students to protect themselves against the epidemic.

A first training seminar was held on Friday, for the various actors, in which a set of planned activities and dissemination of leaflets in schools.

MENFP also made distributions of products in schools, such as soap, chlorine and other treatment products, and completed the installation of tankers of drinking water in schools with the support of the United Nations Fund for (UNICEF). Francoise Gruloos Ackermans, of UNICEF, called the school population has always observe hygiene as a preventive measure, and indicated that the distributions of products should reach a large number of schools in the country, adding that over 5,000 schools considered as vulnerable were identified.

MENFP, called on school principals to take steps to educate their staff and students on ways to prevent and mitigate the effects of cholera in using information tools available to them by Health Direction, Nutrition and Education of MENFP. In addition, the MENFP, requires teaching staff to develop their schedules, education activities on cholera, to maintain continuous health monitoring in schools.

While welcoming this initiative, we can only regret that it took 22 days to launch such program in schools, while our neighbors, five days after the first case of cholera confirmed in Haiti, such programs were put in place. Faced with such a slow response, one should not be surprised by the spread of cholera in our country.

IP/ HaitiLibre