She said it was important to stay away from unhealthy activities that had the tendency to cause germs infestation.

“Let us dispel the long held belief that African germs do not kill. A visit to our health centres, clinics and hospitals gives an indication of the causes of death and health implications of children ignorantly swallowing seemingly harmless dirt on their hands,” she said.

She made the call at a ceremony to commemorate the Unilever Ghana Global Hand Washing Day in Accra last Friday.

The event was dubbed “High 5 for hand-washing—give us a High 5 and we’ll teach 5 kids handwashing.”

It was celebrated on the theme: “Our hands, Our future.”

The global hand-washing day has been observed annually every October 15 since 2008.

Diseases

Mrs Akufo-Addo said the day-to-day activities of children made them vulnerable to diseases such as diarrhoea, since they picked things from the ground and put them in their mouths or blew their noses with their bare hands.

She added that children ignorantly swallowed the seemingly harmless dirt that got deposited on their hands.

She entreated adults, therefore, to take up the responsibility for educating children to wash their hands not just with water, but with soap under running water as well.

Handwashing

The Managing Director of Unilever Ghana, Mr Ziobeieton Yeo, who also addressed the gathering, said it was worrying that although people cleaned their hands with water, very few people used soap in washing their hands.

“Even when soap is available, it is mostly reserved for laundry and bathing instead of washing hands,” Mr Yeo stated, and said Unilever was committed to helping communities around the world to improve their health through hand-washing.

He said the initiative had since its inception in 2014 reached over two million people in Ghana and the objective was to get people to commit to hand-washing with soap under running water before breakfast, lunch, dinner and after visiting the toilet and help children acquire the habit before they reached age five.

He said the event that was being celebrated formed part of the company’s corporate social responsibility.

Teach children

Some schoolchildren washing their hands to commemorate Global Hand-washing Day at the Independence Square, Accra

For her part, the Minister for Gender Children and Social Protection, Ms Otiko Afisa Djaba, observed that teaching children how to wash their hands with soap would help guarantee the future children wished for themselves.

She encouraged children to listen carefully to the lessons that would be taught on how to properly wash their hands with soap in order not to become infected with diseases.

In a speech read on his behalf, the Minister of Health, Mr Kwaku Agyeman Manu, said the hands were vehicles for the transmission of infections and accounted for 32 per cent of deaths among children.

He said it was time to change the status quo and commended Unilever Ghana for championing the cause to eliminate diseases such as diarrhoea and pneumonia through hand-washing.

Mr Manu encouraged health workers to use every opportunity they get to remind patients and other clients of the need to wash their hands at least five times a day.