When dozens of learners fall ill after eating contaminated food or drinking unsafe water, the response is often swift. Children are rushed to hospital, investigations are launched and schools are temporarily closed.
But according to public health officers, Kenya continues to ask the wrong question.
Instead of asking how to treat sick learners, they say the country should be asking why preventable outbreaks continue to happen in the first place.
The warning comes against the backdrop of repeated school food poisoning and disease outbreaks that have affected hundreds of learners over the years.
In 2023, more than 50 pupils at St Andrew's Primary School in Kitui were hospitalised after consuming suspected contaminated maize flour. Public health officers later seized hundreds of kilograms of expired flour during investigations.
Nearly two decades earlier, one of the country's worst public health emergencies struck eastern Kenya when contaminated maize containing aflatoxins caused 317 illnesses and claimed 125 lives, many of them school-going children.
In Bungoma, another outbreak linked to leptospirosis infected more than 800 learners and staff after exposure to contaminated environments, exposing weaknesses in environmental health surveillance.
To the Kenya Environmental Health and Public Health Practitioners Union (KEHPHPU), these outbreaks are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a preventive health system that is steadily being weakened.
The union says the draft Kenya School Health Policy 2026–2035 risks shifting school health further away from disease prevention by placing greater emphasis on clinical care while overlooking environmental health professionals.
"The policy is clinicalising school health," said the union's Secretary General Brown Ashira.
"When children fall sick, nurses and clinicians are needed to treat them. But preventing those illnesses before they happen is the responsibility of Public Health Officers."
According to Ashira, Public Health Officers are legally mandated to inspect institutional kitchens, monitor food handling practices, test drinking water, oversee sanitation standards, manage waste disposal systems and conduct disease surveillance in schools.
Yet the draft policy, they argue, gives prominence to Community Health Practitioners while failing to define the role of Public Health Officers and Community Health Assistants.
“Both the union (KEHPHPU) and the Public Health Officers and Technicians Council (PHOTC) must come out of the shadows. We must demand a seat at the table to review the draft policy. We need to reposition PHOs firmly into school structures as School Health Officers (SHCs) or PHO Community Health Extension Workers (PHO CHEWs) to align directly with the Bora Afya (Primary Healthcare) pillar.” He said
The union warns that schools are increasingly investing in treatment while neglecting prevention.
"Treating disease is expensive. Preventing it is sustainable," the Secretary General said.
He argues that routine inspection of kitchens, food stores, water sources and sanitation facilities can identify hazards long before they become outbreaks requiring emergency medical response.
The concerns come as Kenya continues to record periodic food poisoning incidents in learning institutions, with investigations frequently pointing to contaminated food, poor hygiene, unsafe water, improper food storage and inadequate sanitation.
Public health officers say those are precisely the risks their profession is trained to identify and eliminate before children become patients.
The union is now calling for Public Health Officers to be formally integrated into the Kenya School Health Policy as School Health Officers or Public Health Officer Community Health Extension Workers, saying their expertise should form part of the country's broader Bora Afya primary healthcare reforms.
The debate also comes as Public Health Officers remain on a nationwide strike over what they describe as years of neglect of preventive healthcare. Their demands include the absorption of Universal Health Coverage workers into permanent and pensionable terms, recognition of their union and clearer career progression pathways.
The Ministry of Health has yet to respond to the union's concerns regarding the draft school health policy.
For public health practitioners, however, the issue extends beyond labour relations.
Every school outbreak, they argue, is a reminder that prevention rarely makes headlines, until it fails.
