How often do you wash your towel? Some people wash once a week, while some, once a year. The towel is a fertile breeding ground for millions of microbes, especially those found on human skin and on the gut. No wonder the towel is one of the objects that facilitate fecal-oral contamination (literally connecting the two ends of the gut). Worse still, most people keep towels in the bathroom (near the toilet). Every flush of the toilet sends mist with millions of microbes, ranging from H.pylori, salmonella and other deadly bacteria and viruses. When you wash your hands ready for a meal, and dry them with your body towel, there's high chance you are directly ingesting your fecal matter, or, if in a shared lavatory, someone else's faeces. Unless cleaned well, viruses such as human papillomavirus (causes warts, anal cancer and cervical cancer) can be transmitted when towels are shared with infected individuals. So, what to do? 1. Launder towels once a week. 2. Use hot water and det...
By Dikembe Disembe What constitutes iconic photographs? This year, together with other Kenyan students, I had an opportunity to visit, albeit for the shortest time, the United States of America. When the tour ended and I took the next plane back home, relived somehow, I sat in between an elderly couple. Soon we were in a heated conversation during which the woman told me she was in the same class with our own Hillary Ng’weno and the man informed me he had been in Liberia when our own Gen Opande was searching for an elusive peace in that war torn country. The man, a frenchman, as it turned out, was a retired former Assistant Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations. Between Dulles in Washington DC and Schipol, we pendulumed back and forth on so many international issues affecting Africa, Europe, USA and the little historical tidbits which make international politics such a confusing, contradictory and confounding affair. Of course the man knew we had an election in March where we ...