A hygiene intervention to improve mothers' weaning food handling practices in rural Gambia
Dr. Buba Manjang, Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Buba Manjang is Deputy-Director of Public Health in the Directorate of Public Health in the Gambia. He is a recipient of a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship and working on the Water Security as a Foundation for Healthy Communities and Sustainable Livelihoods project in the Faculty of Environment.
When? Thursday March 7th 12.00-1.30pm
Where? LHN 1703
Coffee and cookies or timbits will be provided; please RSVP global.health@uwaterloo.ca so we have an idea of numbers.
Abstract:
Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (2018) indicates that unsafe drinking water, unsafe sanitation and lack of hygiene continue to be major contributors to global morbidity and mortality, resulting in about 870,000 deaths in 2016. These deaths were mainly caused by diarrhoeal diseases and intestinal nematode infections. This presentation describes an RCT-based intervention in rural Gambia designed to address a particularly important critical control point in childhood nutrition: improving mothers’ weaning food hygiene and handling practices. The public health, community level intervention was effective in improving mothers’ compliance to hygienic weaning food handling practices in rural Gambia. There was reduced microbial contamination of weaning food contamination as well as lower diarrhoea incidence and hospital admission.