Uganda fears alcohol could be disguised as hand sanitiser

KAMPALA - Education officials in Uganda have warned parents not to pack hand sanitisers for their children returning to school today, fearing that it could result in alcohol abuse, Daily Monitor reports.

Schools should instead ensure there's water and soap at different sites, Benson Kule, the commissioner directorate of education standards, said.

Kule said that if students were allowed to carry hand sanitisers some could use the opportunity to bring alcohol to school.

“Sanitisers can be used for offices and teachers alone and not for learners. The alcohol content is very high. Learners are young people. They should be protected. Some will be carrying waragi (gin) saying it is a sanitiser and you will not be able to tell. You will end up with a drunk school,” he said.

Final year students in primary and secondary schools will resume learning today, six months after the country imposed a lockdown to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile in Nairobi, the Africa Centres for Disease Control (CDC) has warned that more than 800 million Africans could be infected with coronavirus, if the virus is allowed to spread deliberately with the aim of achieving herd immunity.

The projection is a worst case scenario.

This could put the lives of 8.4 million Africans at risk if immunity was to be achieved naturally, Africa CDC added.

Herd immunity is a situation in which a sufficient proportion of a population is immune to an infectious disease through vaccination and/ or prior illness to make its spread from person to person unlikely.

Wessam Mankoula, the incident manager for Covid-19 at the Africa CDC, said the risk of deliberately giving the virus an avenue to spread will come at a high human cost.

World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom told journalists on Monday that relying on obtaining herd immunity naturally would be scientifically and ethically problematic.

"Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it," he said.

"Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic."

Both the Africa CDC and the WHO say the continent has done well in dealing with the pandemic. They attribute this to the strict lockdowns that were imposed at the early stages of the pandemic. – BBC.