Health issues may soon find place in school curriculum

JAIPUR: If the education department accepts proposal of the health department, the students will soon be able to learn about new and long existing diseases in schools. Since the burden of diseases rapidly increasing in the state, health department has sought help of the education department to include health-related issues in school curriculum.
The state has witnessed spurt in swine flu cases recently also dengue has become a menace and new diseases such as scrub typhus is also expanding its reach and cases of Zika has also been reported recently.The diseases, which are preventable, have claimed many lives in the past few years.
The health department is taking all possible measures to spread awareness on the diseases and in the series, it has written a letter to the education department to accommodate health issues along with seasonal diseases, hygiene and water-borne and food-borne diseases in school curriculum. “We have learnt by experience that if adequate preventive measures are taken not only by healthcare personnel but also by community, the incidence and the consequent adverse impact can be avoided,” additional chief secretary (health) Rohit Kumar Singh wrote to principal secretary (education) R Venkateswaran on Tuesday.
“Students play a very important role in induce behavioral change not only in the families but also in the community. If we target the children through their formal education system appropriately, it can bring about a substantial improvement in the society’s socio-economic development including health,” says the letter.
Health department expressed the need to make students aware about seasonal diseases like swine flu, malaria, dengue, chikungunya, scrub typhus, food borne and water borne diseases. Also, it has also suggested to include menstrual hygiene of girls and women in school curriculum as research has shown that if challenges pertaining to menstrual hygiene are adequately addressed during adolescence, many of the future health problems in women can be prevented.
Also, it has also expressed need to aware children in young age on food safety, which has recently emerged as a big challenge. “Contaminated, adulterated, substandard and other problems plague the supply of food products in the market, both packaged and otherwise. Children need to be made aware of such issue so that while consuming food they exercise adequate caution about its quality,” says the letter.