The Lagos State Government is set to break another Guinness Book of
World Record as it is going to mobilise 300,000 students to break the
world record held by India in tooth brushing.
Between 21 and 23
May, 300,000 students in Lagos public secondary schools will brush their
teeth simultaneously at different locations in a bid to promote oral
health.
The previous record was set by India in 2007 when 177,003
students in the country brushed their teeth simultaneously at a single
day.
The 300,000 students would be mobilised from 300 selected public secondary schools in Lagos State.
The
government is partnering with the Project Head of the Lagos World
Record Tooth Brushing Challenge, Dr. Lawal Bakare to attempt to break
the record.
At a news conference on Sunday in Ikeja, Lagos,
Southwest Nigeria, Special Adviser to the Governor on Public Health, Dr.
Yewande Adeshina said in preparation to set a new world record in
tooth brushing, 150 school students would demonstrate the act on 20
March at Teslim Balogun Stadium during the celebration of World Oral
Day.
According Adeshina, “one of the unspoken complications of
poor dental hygiene is heart disease and a lot of people do not know
that if you do not take care of your teeth, if you don’t brush your
teeth and visit the dentist at least once a year, you may be prone to
getting a heart disease which may kill you.
“We tend to take the
mouth for granted but unfortunately, the mouth is actually one of the
passages into the body from where we take nourishment and other things.
We have a big gap between the educated and the non-educated members of
our community in the importance of dental health.
“The way we
brush our teeth has been trivialised to the point that over the years as
we get older we build germs, we build bacteria and we build diseases in
our mouths that may kill us without our knowledge.”
Adeshina
added: “we will be taking on the actual challenge in a few weeks’ time
when we will have 300,000 students brushing their teeth at the same time
in an attempt to break the record set in India where at least 176,000
people brushed their teeth at the same time.”
Project Head, Lagos
World Record Tooth Brushing Challenge, Dr. Bakare gave a background to
the challenge, saying that in March 2010, he applied to the World
Records Limited in the United Kingdom to set a record of the number of
people who would be brushing their teeth at the same time at multiple
locations.
He stated that “the objective was to use this as a
mechanism of improving Oral health literacy for those who would
participate in the event.”
According to him, since September 2012
when the first press conference on the Challenge was held in Lagos, a
lot of activities had been held, including publishing dental manuals for
secondary schools and training over 200 Science teachers as well as
engaging the social media to educate the public on oral health all in
attempt to ensure that the world record attempt is valuable to all
stakeholders even years after the world record has been broken.
“We
have formed collaboration between Lagos State Government, Nigerian
Dental Association and secondary schools, through the Ministry of
Education. All of these are to ensure that the future dates for this
event are secure for all and sundry,” he explained.
—Kazeem Ugbodaga.
SOURCE: PM NEWS
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