Jiggers are a national embarrassment
By Abbey K. Semuwemba
4th Oct 2010
The author
The news that most parts of the Busoga region are now infested with jiggers is mind blowing. It is embarrassing to all of us considering that Busoga has been voting President Museveni and his NRM in big numbers since 1996.
For those who don’t know what jiggers are, it’s a special pathological condition caused by fleas of the genus Tunga. A jigger is also called chigoe. A jigger often attacks the feet or any exposed part of the human body. When it burrows beneath the skin, it produces great irritation.
When the female is allowed to remain and breed, troublesome sores result which are sometimes dangerous. Most people in the developed nations know a jigger as a bartending tool used to measure liquor not as a dangerous insect as it is in Africa and Asia.
As someone who partly grew up at a small village called Kisega (Kangulumira in Bugerere), I saw how jiggers affected people and what a lack of healthcare does to people. The two major hospitals at Nagalama and Kayunga towns are miles away from Kisega.
Health centres in the area are too ill-equipped to handle major health problems. As such I think health care should be designated as a special “right” to everyone in Uganda and probably the whole of Africa. It should be as much a right as life, liberty, and happiness are because I don’t believe that only people with money should have good health care.
Health care should be accessed by people who can’t afford life-saving treatment too because their lives are not worth less than the lives of those with a lot of money. Why should health care be any different from police, fire or military protection? Would one want one’s house to burn down because the neighbour paid for fire protection and one did not?
Everybody needs a doctor at some time, just as everybody needs roads and schools and fire protection. These are things that only a government can supply to the people they represent.
Yes, I acknowledge that none of those things magically appear just because I say people have a right to them. No one has an unconstrained “right” to as much medical care. But I think the government needs to find a way to make sure that the less privileged can access medical care as the wealthy ones.
The picture in the Monitor Newspaper of the woman struggling to feed her kid when they are both suffering from jiggers was so upsetting and yet most of these conditions are treatable and preventable.
As UK epidemiologists Professor Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett said in their book titled The Spirit Level: “Why Equality is Better for Everyone”, social inequality is one of the causes of the poor health.
As such, I think health care should be as much as a right as free speech is. Cosmetic surgery, for example, might in general not be considered health care. If one wants to look 20 years younger it’s on one’s dime.
Historically, national health care programs were first instituted by Otto von Bismarck in imperial Germany in 1883 before it later spread to the rest of Europe. In USA, former president Harry Truman proposed it to the Congress following World War 11 but it was defeated by a coalition led by American Medical Association.
In his message to Congress on Nov. 19th 1945, Truman asked members to support his Economic Bill of Rights which included the “right to adequate health care”.
For the meantime, I advice people in Busoga to put on Leather or rubber shoes which could shod their feet from jiggers at least as we wait for the government to address some of the social inequalities in our society. END. If it’s Monday, it’s Uganda Correspondent. Never miss out again!
Abbey Semuwemba is a graduate student of Public Health Promotion in the UK
