- Sossion said fresh inspections will help to avert disasters like the one seen in Mukumu Girls High School.
- At the beginning of April Sacred Heart Mukumu Girls' High School saw over 124 of its students hospitalised at the Kakamega County General Hospital in a suspected case of food and water poisoning.
Image: CHARLENE MALWA
Former Knut secretary general Wilson Sossion has called on the Ministry of Health to conduct new inspections into living standards in public schools.
Sossion said this is necessary to avert more disasters in schools like the ones seen in the previous weeks.
“All schools should be inspected afresh and where there is a challenge in sanitation that ought to be addressed because this problem is not in one school, it’s quite a number of schools in Western,” Sossion said on K24 on Tuesday
He said the problems experienced in Mukumu Girls High School are not isolated to that school alone and that more schools in the country could be experiencing the same nightmare.
“The truth is it is not only Mukumu Girls, but it is also all schools, if there is a school in Kenya with a population of 2,000 students, then we’re sitting on a time bomb,” he said
He urged the Ministry of Education to go back to the drawing board and reassess the decision to overpopulate boarding schools saying that such decisions are likely to cause a problem for students and the country at large.
“That tells you about the high risk in terms of disaster. Are we prepared for such disaster in schools where we have overenrolled and I think it is time also the Ministry of Education takes up and reverses populating boarding schools,” he said
At the beginning of April Sacred Heart Mukumu Girls' High School saw over 124 of its students hospitalised at the Kakamega County General Hospital in a suspected case of food and water poisoning.
The school was closed on April 3, after the outbreak claimed the lives of three students and one teacher- leaving hundreds of others hospitalized, and in critical condition.
The Ministry of Health through Director General for Health Patrick Amoth revealed that the food Mukumu girls high school students consumed was contaminated with fresh faeces.
"The Ministry wishes to inform the general public that this disease is likely to be a mixture of E. coli and Salmonella typhi which usually occurs if water sources are contaminated with these micro-organisms," he said.
Escherichia coli (E. coli) is a bacteria commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms that can cause food poisoning.
Salmonella enterica typhi is a gram-negative bacterium that is responsible for typhoid fever.
The school is scheduled for reopening early next month.