Lagos state government has announced that unregistered tiger nut drinks have not been identified as the cause of the recent cholera outbreak in the state.
Gatekeepers News reports that before this, there had been reports circulating that special adviser to the Lagos state governor on health, Kemi Ogunyemi said unregistered tiger nut drinks were the cause of the outbreak.
According to the reports, Kemi said during an interview on Sunday that a survey carried out in Eti-Osa LGA showed that people who visited hospitals in the early days of the outbreak said they had consumed unregistered tiger nut drink.
She said, “We found empty bottles with a name on them, but we discovered that it wasn’t even registered with the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, the regulatory body that ensures the safety of consumables.”
“There was a phone number and a name on the bottle, and we started tracing. We did contact tracing, similar to what we did with COVID-19. We combed the area to ask people where they got the drinks from.”
“We couldn’t find any full bottles. We only found empty ones, which were of no use because we could not test them. The phone number on the bottle was not reachable.”
Spokesman of the Ministry of Health in Lagos, Tunbosun Ogunbanwa however noted that the special adviser was misquoted.
He said “Investigations into what caused the outbreak is still ongoing. It is not true that it was caused by tiger nut drink.”
