Traditional Medicine in Waste Bottles: Prospects of an Integrated Waste Bottle Management

摘要

The paper investigates the relationship between community health and wastes management in Nigeria. Due to the harsh economic situation, the high cost of orthodox treatments and the associated drugs, many people presently patronize African traditional medicine. In a bid to remain healthy in midst of economic woes, many have got infections and illnesses from consuming traditional medicine bottled or stored in waste bottles which are neither sterilized nor certified clean.rnOn the other hand, it is also a fact and popular too those dead ants or their parts and other particles are often seen in corked drinks like beer, soda and water etc. If this occurs at a higher level of brewery and bottling such as in Coca-cola, Pepsi and Guinness etc, the people are no longer surprise when they see such impurities in the lowest level of bottling as we have it in the traditional medicine practice.rnThe reason for the above situation is not far-fetched. A journey around our cities shows that waste bottles make up 60 percent of our solid wastes. Our traditional medicine practitioners source their bottles directly from waste dumps or indirectly from traditional waste bottle collectors. Again, 95 percent of bottles used in our bottling companies and breweries are bottles that have been used more than once. And given the fact that our people care for the content of the bottles and not the bottles themselves, they subject empty bottles to various kinds of abuses before they get back to the bottling companies for reuse. Most often, the empty bottles are homes to ants, mosquitoes and cockroaches, some of which usually die and stick permanently in them.rnAs a result of the low level of quality control in Nigeria, community health is put at risk when these bottles are reused for bottling of food, wine and drugs. This can account for the occasional outbreaks of diseases such as Cholera, Typhoid, Dysentery and Diarrhea etc.rnThis paper examines the prospects of an integrated waste bottle management for the country. It recommends that the government should set up an agency that will regulate and control the use of waste bottles both in traditional medicine, pharmaceutical and other bottling companies. The agency is to procure, sterilize and certify the use of waste bottles by affixing their certification mark or number on them. If this is made possible there will higher prospects for community health and environmental protection. It will also stimulate economic activities and bring about higher revenues for the governmentrnand traditional wastes bottle collectors.