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"speaker_name": "Dr. Ojiambo",
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"content": "Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to thank hon. Members for their great 3940 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES November 23, 2006 support for this Bill. The ideas that have been brought into this Bill this afternoon are very enriching indeed. We are going to use them substantially to improve the final product. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I was very happy with the contribution of the Minister and the support the Ministry has given us on this Bill. Indeed, like the Minister has said, we have worked with the Ministry of Health very closely. We have also worked with the Ministry of Agriculture, Office of the President and the Ministry of Planning and National Development closely on this Bill. Therefore, I want to thank the Government Ministries and departments for the great support that they have given us. We have also worked very closely with hospitals and health workers in this area. District nutritionists have also brought in their input. We have worked with the Chief Nutritionist and her line up in the hospitals and field services. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to thank the contributors because they have added to our own deliberations and enriched them substantially. I was happy to note that the Minister supports that we strengthen the Board and indeed it is very appropriate that we do so in view of what contributions we have received this afternoon suggesting that we must enhance the level of the standards. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, as suggested by Mr. Muchiri, we have to look at the proposed board, council and institute, to avoid overlapping. It is, indeed, appropriate that we look at the council as the body that services the institute. Below that, we shall have the committees that will do the registration in the manner that has been suggested by this House. We shall then have the examination and disciplinary committees under the council. That way, we will have a body that is sufficiently empowered to regulate the activities of this profession, and which will satisfy the professionals, whom we seem very closely endeared to, from hon. Members' contributions to this debate this afternoon. I want to thank hon. Members for the suggestions they have made about training and research, and that we should incorporate in this Bill, the value that research institutions in this country dream about, and the value that the universities that we have bring to this whole profession. I want to assure hon. Members that we are very considerate of even the transitional stage: How we will incorporate our field workers, who over the years, have contributed to the area of food and nutrition in this country, even without recognition. Some of those workers have not even been endowed with great education and degrees as we are now able to offer. We want to find a way of bringing their contribution into this Bill and ensuring that all the other institutions below the university level are netted, so that the contribution that they bring to this profession is harnessed. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I was very impressed by the support that traditional crops and foods have been given by the contributors to the Bill this afternoon. This is an area in which the country has lagged behind in appreciating. We want to use this opportunity to ensure that the nutritional value that we have in this country is harnessed. We still have a lot of indigenous crops, food preparation and feeding methods that are very useful, and which can add up very good nutrition for our nation. Our communities are made up of people of different ages and requirements. Mention has been made of pregnant and lactating mothers of teenagers. We have also a great part of our population who work. Indeed, with our President's emphasis on creation of a working nation, we need to ensure that our workers are properly fed on nutritious food. We should also ensure that vulnerable groups like expectant and lactating mothers, as well as teenage boys and girls, are given adequate nutrition to enable them develop physically and mentally. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, for that reason, we will ensure that adequate mechanisms are embodied in this Bill to provide for the necessary research, survey and compilation of data to give November 23, 2006 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 3941 this nation reference points and reference material, which they can utilise to benefit the families, the institutions, the sick and others who are in conditions that need nutritional support. We will ensure that at our universities, we employ teaching techniques that will bring together the medics and the nutritionists, so that we can benefit from each other's scientific experiences in terms of disease prevention and cure. I am happy that although most of the hon. Members who contributed to this Bill are not nutritionists or medical experts, they understand this area very well. Their contributions have shown their understanding and appreciation of this subject and accepted the fact that, as Parliament and Government, we have been slow in providing a legal framework to ensure that practitioners in this area are able to express themselves adequately and, therefore, benefit us. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, what is remaining now is for us to put together, into amendments, the views that have been expressed here by hon. Members, before enacting this Bill into law. I want to call upon the hon. Members who have contributed to this debate to provide us with suggestions as to what specific amendments they want incorporated, where matters may not been strongly provided for in this Bill. As I said, we intend to harmonise all the views that have been brought up, so that we can have a legal framework that will handle the very critical issues of our very survival; nutrition. Nutrition scientists talk about optimal standards. The optimal nutrition standards, literally, means optimal health in that there is a threshold at which the human body must reach to be able to ward off diseases, accumulate in its cells enough energy for work and keep itself in a good mental framework. This is the area that, we, as nutritionists, want to look into. We want to encourage our universities to contribute to this profession by training clinical nutritionists as well as public health nutritionists for both curative and preventive services, besides the researchers who work in the laboratories for long hours every day, to ensure that commodities that are not good enough are picked up and researched upon, to enable us understand what it was that was not good in the market. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to make reference to Prof. Mango's mention of aflatoxin. In this country, aflatoxin has taken many lives. It is an incident that comes periodically. Every year, we come across aflatoxin. We have only been able to recognise aflatoxin, as a nation, because it comes and we see many people dying at a go. As we have said, there are certain areas in the food itself, and the crops that we grow, which contain chemicals that hinder absorption of the food. As legislators, this is something we cannot talk about because we do not know how it works. However, we now have the nutritionists and dieticians, who will analyse these foodstuffs and tell us: \"Do not feed patients with this foodstuff. Do not mix this particular foodstuff with this foodstuff, because this mix is not good, not only for palatability but also for absorption.\" The rest will go back to the drafters to make sure that it is in the interest of this House to bring to this country a legislation that works. Just before I finish, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, there was an emphasis on the representation of the professionals on the Board. There was also an issue that was raised about the composition of the Board and the Assistant Minister for Health talked about the inadequacy of the current legislation for laboratory technicians. I am very glad that this issue came up, because we had talked about it in one of our sittings when we were drafting this Bill. We were not able to understand how some of these institutions are working. It was good to know that the Assistant Minister also has the same sentiments about this issue. It will strengthen our decision on how we move. I want to thank him for that. With these few remarks and with gratitude to the House, I beg to move."
}