Lifestyle

Health Advisor Kenya Is Transforming the Health Industry

BY · August 7, 2015 07:08 am

We live in a country where we are exposed to too much harmful products and practices, leaving each and every one of us to be vigilant about our own health. Just recently we had to wait for a certain brand of noodles to be withdrawn from other countries before Kenya could follow suit, yet it’s a product that had been banned for many years in several countries around the world. To date, weight loss drugs are advertised openly yet any person who has studied anything on health knows how harmful some of these concoctions are to our organs.

Some of the Beauty products sold in the beauty shops are so toxic that anyone with a science background wonders what the health of this country will look like 30 years from now. There have also been several occurrences when I thought Kenya would be up in arms protesting about the mediocre regulations on some practices but nobody seems to have raised a finger. One recent case is where vegetables from Kenya were rejected by Europe because of having excess pesticides residue but instead of the produce being disposed it was sold off in supermarkets to Kenyans.

It was all over the papers but Kenyans were peacefully serving dinner to their families with the same vegetables ignorantly. Then we sit back and wonder how diseases are plaguing the country every day. Ever wonder why the organic farmers market in Kenya are mostly visited by 80% whites yet the prices of organic vegetables and produce there is equivalent to the poisoned vegetables you buy from your mama mboga? Ever wonder why the only vegetables sold to the US embassy are 100% organic? The big picture is that Kenyans are not aware of the many harmful substances we feed ourselves every day.

We spend many hours on Facebook, twitter and other social sites every day. In all those hours do you spend few minutes to read something on health? There is a lot of health information provided everyday by newspapers, TV stations and many online platforms for Kenyans but for several reasons few people read about it. In a country where diseases like cancer, complications from diabetes, hypertension and other diseases are becoming everyone’s burden, it’s our responsibility to empower ourselves with information on matters regarding health every day. As a country we are exposed to so many risk factors due to our ignorance and lack of or little regulations on the many risk factors we are exposed to everyday. We mostly become aware when it’s too late.

There is a lot of health information carried everyday by newspapers, TVs and many online platforms. But we live in a country where very few people can afford a paper every day. This leaves the bigger population with little exposure to the information.

When Health Advisor Kenya was founded, the objective was to make it easy to find medical consultation in the country by providing the physical location of all consultants, telephone number and the days available. These are consultants who are legally registered by the medical practitioners and dentist board. This would also help reduce the chances of visiting quacks as sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between a genuine healthcare provider and a quack. With time we also noted how much health information and news was available through the papers both locally and internationally but very few people can afford buying a paper daily.

Health Advisor Kenya has come in to make it possible for everyone to get daily health news, links and tips through your phone six days in a week. This comes as a daily SMS text sent to you. It contains a link that leads you to both national and international health news, health jobs and health links all in one SMS. Subscription is by sending an SMS with the word HEALTH to 21038. Charges are only 10shs a day.

The advantages of this are:

Unlike papers that you keep on the shelf after reading, you will always have the SMS on your phone as long as you don’t delete it making it easy for reference at a later date.