National Bio-Safety Seeks Collaboration with EHORECON on Pollution Control
Concerned by the growing food poisoning and diseases in the country, the Registrar of the Environmental Health Officers Registration Council of Nigeria (EHORECON), Dominic Abonyi has revealed that Environmental Health Officers will always ensure the pursuit of food safety through non-contamination or pollution.
The Registrar stated this when the Chief Executive Officer of the National Bio-safety Agency paid him a courtesy visit in Abuja, recently.
According to Abonyi, the Council has great interest in bio-technological approach to disease prevention and control, adding that in as much as National Bio-safety could help people in food production and help people in vaccine production also in health, then, “the Council can derive benefit in rolling back all the diseases that are scourging man through environmental insults.”
He opined that the primary mandate of the Council is to determine who could be called an environmental health practitioner and that the Council keeps a register of practitioners and facilitate training and certification of such individuals and also monitors the practice and regulates it for the betterment of man.
Earlier, the Chief Executive Officer, National Bio-safety Agency, Mr. Rufus Ebegba said theirs was to ensure that the practice of modern bio-technology does not have adverse impact on the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.
According to the Bio-safety boss, when looking at the issue of environment “it is to ensure that genetically modified organisms do not become super organism and are not created to distract the environment by applying the ecosystem.”
He explained that the role of the Agency was to regulate and ensure that the law was complied with, to this regard, and by extension, the law and the Act has created an enabling environment for Nigerian scientist to use bio-technology to improve the agricultural sector and also to produce raw materials for industrial purposes.
It also enables the medical field to also get novel materials that can be used to enhance the medical field to produce drugs like the insulin, being used for diabetes.
Ebegba, however, revealed that the same process could also be used to develop plants that could be kept to ameliorate the impact of climate change and to also produce plants that could survive in drought-prone areas.