800,000 COMMITS SUICIDE ANNUALLY, SAYS WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION
The health organization in a publication release on Tuesday said restricting access to pesticides will also help, “preventing suicide: a resource for pesticide registrars and regulators”, the best-studied country is Sri Lanka, where a series of bans led to a 70 per cent fall in suicides and an estimated 93 000 lives saved between 1995 and 2015.
“In the Republic of Korea – where the herbicide paraquat accounted for the majority of pesticide suicide deaths in the 2000s – a ban on paraquat in 2011-2012 was followed by a halving of suicide deaths from pesticide poisoning between 2011 and 2013,” the report noted.
The organization stated that such interventions have shown success in reducing suicides, with record that, the most common methods of suicide is hanging, pesticide self-poisoning, and firearms, adding that it had estimated that the method used for 20 per cent of global suicides was through pesticide self-poisoning and these mostly occur in developing countries.
Penpushing further reports that, suicide rate in Nigeria is alarming with the use of ‘Sniper’, an agrochemical, increasingly becoming a choice killer for persons contemplating suicide, and this was acknowledged Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC).
The agency therefore placed ban on the chemical adding that it became necessary because the recent wave of suicide cases across the country had been linked to the intake of Sniper, but findings showed that the ban is yet to be fully enforced as the product is still accessible in the open markets.
