This year, World Health Day will be celebrated on 7th April and the focus will be on Food Safety. World Health Organisation (WHO) has highlighted the challenges and opportunities associated with food safety under the slogan “From farm to plate, make food safe.” 1

Women take great care in cooking the right food for their family taking care of the nutritious value of each ingredient, minimizing the content of processed food and looking out to offer an overall hygienic preparation. No matter what precautions you take, there is something that creeps once at least even in the cleanest of kitchens.

The sneaky little thing that most of you encounter in your kitchen is the cockroach. Not only are cockroaches icky, they are also carriers of diseases common amongst kids, such as diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid, gastroenteritis.

Did you know: Katsaridaphobia is the term for fear of Cockroaches? 2

Ever imagined what these cockroaches might have crawled through before reaching your kitchen and crawling through your food? Cockroaches thrive in unsanitary conditions such as faecal matter, garbage, drains etc; they then enter your kitchen, because kitchen is a storehouse of food and water for them. Even if one takes utmost care in keeping all food items properly cleaned and covered, the presence of cockroaches will contaminate the utensils, kitchen shelves, microwave ovens, gas stoves and cause diseases which are common amongst your kids.

The presence of 1 or 2 cockroaches is generally ignored by most individuals but the fact that female cockroaches lay 10-40 eggs at a time and have the capacity to do this 30 times in their life-cycle should be sufficient to understand the expanse of a contagion that can be caused by just a few cockroaches. With ample food supply, warmth, nesting area, your house may provide an ideal environment for them to multiply rapidly. They are generally nocturnal and therefore their true numbers are difficult to identify, however, if you see one of them during the day then they might have come out due to overcrowding in its nest and it should be an even greater reason of concern as they are out looking to set-up another colony of cockroach in your house. They grow behind closed spaces in the corners of your kitchen, below the sinks, drain entries unnoticed and unconcerned.

Oldest cockroach fossil ever found was 350 million years old. This means cockroaches were present on Earth even before humans and also… Dinosaurs! 3

So what should we do when we spot these cockroaches? How to tackle them? These are some definitive preventive measures that you should take:

1. Being alert even if you encounter 1 roach
2. Cleaning the kitchen thoroughly atleast once a week,
3. Cleaning underneath and behind appliances,
4. Emptying bins regularly,
5. Cleaning food spills immediately,
6. Keeping food in sealed containers,
7. Making sure that plumbing is intact as dripping water can facilitate their comfortable life in your kitchen,
8. For the areas that you can’t reach like sink holes, cracks and cervices in your kitchen using appropriate aerosol like HIT with seek and kill applicators. These seek and kill applicators helps you reach the areas like sink holes, cracks and cervices where cockroaches hide. 2 sprays in these areas once a week will help you prevent these cockroaches from entering your kitchen.

These small steps can assure a healthy lifestyle and let you feed your family in peace. After all the food that you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison. The choice is yours.