Greeting-culture of shaking hands in our societies must go: It's a health scare: Our water sources too!

It is our culture too to shake hands when we great, this gesture of greeting peoples are global, is found in almost all cultures of the world. Hand-shaking is the easiest and the fastest vehicle of microbial cross-contamination. Our poor hygienic behaviours are lethal and dangerous to the next persons.  Food - and waterborne microbial diseases cross-contamination is common in Zimbabwe and it is those very uncomfortable questions we have to tell ourselves: if these diseases are preventable let's avoid shaking hands when greeting each other.  Again our water sources: our wells, boreholes and rivers are the most dangerous place where bacteria, Coli forms, E. coli, Nitrates from fertilizers Herbicides and Pesticides reside that appears to play an important role in transmission of water - and food borne diseases.  

Healthy individuals have normally general resistance to infection but newly born children toddlers, growing children and elderly people have less resistance to microbial infections and these niches are the less likely to wash hands after using the toilets. Teaching young growing population the need to wash hands after a toilet use is a good entry-point. It may be late for the elderly citizens but certainly not in our schools and colleges. However the good government still needed to take its responsibility of giving its citizens the affordable water and sanitation if this is to have respect in the international community.

Most cultures have even perfected the shaking of hands because this body contact carries a lot of information to the person you have contacted for whatever reasons. Is the person warm-hearted, unkind person, uncouth, respectful; all that information is in the body-contact the two people will have made just by a handshake. It is wholly advisable to greet one another differently: warm greetings without a handshake, it is possible to extend your warmness and acceptability without that body contact. In light of recurring diseases such as cholera and typhoid that have visited us due to lack of clean water and clean sanitation we have to look into other ways of reducing body contacts by the merely none body contact, handshakes and again scrutinizing the sources of our water: where does it come from: is it safe to drink it and use it for domestic purposes?
A positive development though: It has become an accepted norm in Zimbabwean funeral gatherings to wash hands by using a jug and a dish so that nobody uses the same used water again and again. This change in culture had reduced enormous deaths due to microbial cross-contaminations. At weddings and funerals it is where hundreds of people gather in one place to share those joys and sorrows of their visits. But also too it is a place where hand-shake also symbolizes your deep affection to the sad/happy occasion: silently passing over bacteria can cause death in most cases.

Another positive note: In Liberia and Sierra Leone because of the disease Ebola-virus, people have learnt to greet one another without body contact. The President of Liberia has demonstrated this none body contact of greeting even to visitors coming on State visits. She is showing the nation that indeed one can warmly appreciate the visits without putting several people in danger of passing on diseases due to lack of hygiene or the absence of it.

There are millions of people both in villages and towns that use bush toilets because there are no toilets today in 2017: poor Zimbabwe! (We got to know that when Mugabe wants a good toilet: he flies to Singapore where he is clinically relieved of his human waste: faeces: has no longer functioning of the peristalsis movement due to old-age) Even if there were those Squatting lavatories, it has not sunk yet in our minds that going to the toilet and the inability to have access to running water to wash hands immediately after the "good business" is a very dangerous thing it means loss of life, may not be your directly but other vulnerable one has contact with.

We can argue and say that in pre-colonial time we did not have toilets: we survived, we used the bush to relieve either "number one" or number two." The good answer to this is that we never settled in such congested and urbanised towns and cities like the lives we live today. Populations have increased to a thousand-fold. When we talk about child mortality rates in any of our societies we should know that it comes from poor until absent clean water and sanitation and the poor hygienic conditions: the culture of washing hands.

We have in mind today of a child who was eaten up by a crocodile when he went to the river to get a bath. This happened not long ago. Who has ever thought that in 2017 in Zimbabwe of all places, with people who brag the highest literacy the whole of Africa, would still have incidences of this nature, a child bathing in the river?  It is not only the danger of crocodiles and other crippie and crawlies that habitat in rivers but serious water-borne diseases that increase child mortality rates.

A country will get respect not by the style of life Grace Gooche and her Family together with the whole President of the Republic of Zimbabwe they live but how a good government looks after its people. Our vast resources should benefit not only a few people in power who live lives of US Californian standards. That there are still people in our societies who suffer from diseases that can be wholly avoided by good health educational outreach and indeed improving the lives of the poor by effectively using the wealth of the country is just inexcusable. We need to fight this Zanu PF regime and we start from 1980: the lost opportunity, squandered time and natural resources.