World Day for menstrual hygiene: a date like others or one to remember?

Can a phenomenon as obvious and natural as menstruation is awarded a celebratory day? This is the question we imagine are asking many people: those for example the menstrual cycle is a fact to be hidden and keeping away from sociability.
It is precisely from the lack of knowledge that we generally have regarding the menstruation that originates this day: in 2014 several organizations have established the Menstral Hygiene Day, an opportunity to generate dialogue, comparison and awareness around publicly unnameable Menses.

In short, of this day we need one of the tools that push us to destroy those prejudices and beliefs that have relegated a natural process to shame. And this does not remain without consequences.

Even today, people overlook puberty completely unprepared compared to the changes that their body will suffer, not least the arrival of menstruation.
This, if in our latitudes it involves shame and embarrassment, in countless other parts of the world the stigma generates conditions of management and awareness of even more extreme menstruation.

A recent research Conduct in the south of Asia, for example, he showed that 33% of school -aged people had never heard of menstruation before his menarca, and even 98% did not know that menstrual blood came from the uterus.

Then transferring from the cultural sphere to the medical one we would see the problem widening to splashing oil. In fact, millions people who, living in extreme poverty conditions, have the road, they have angry when they find hygienic materials that absorb the blood, like traditional swabs and absorbents. It is known how they are used as an absorbent paper, sheets and rags in numerous parts of the world. All with a huge relapse on the level of menstrual hygiene that involves a high increase in the risk of contracting vaginal diseases and infections.

The fact that millions of people who experience menstruation on themselves are still discriminated against is a cultural and social defeat for the world.

What we can do is to break the silence: only in this way can a truly effective battle be carried out in the raising awareness of an easy assumption. Menstruation are a natural process: only by spreading together education and information can we return to this experience the normality that suits them.

 

Alice Carbonara