Bangladesh, Myanmar agree to start Rohingya return in two months

Yahoo – AFP, November 23, 2017

The United Nations says 620,000 Rohingya Muslims have arrived in Bangladesh
 since a military crackdown in Myanmar in August, to form the world's largest refugee
camp (AFP Photo/Munir UZ ZAMAN)

Yangon (AFP) - Bangladesh and Myanmar will start repatriating refugees in two months, Dhaka said Thursday, as global pressure mounts over a crisis that has forced more than half a million Rohingya to flee across the border.

The United Nations says 620,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh since August and now live in squalor in the world's largest refugee camp after a military crackdown in Myanmar that Washington said this week clearly constitutes "ethnic cleansing".

After months of wrangling, Myanmar's civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Dhaka's Foreign Minister A.H. Mahmood Ali inked a deal in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw on Thursday.

Dhaka said they had agreed to start returning the refugees to mainly Buddhist Myanmar in two months.

It said that a working group would be set up within three weeks to agree the arrangements for the repatriation.

"This is a primary step. (They) will take back (Rohingya). Now we have to start working," Ali told reporters in Naypyidaw.

Impoverished and overcrowded Bangladesh has won international praise for allowing the refugees into the country, but has imposed restrictions on their movements and said it does not want them to stay.

Updated map showing major Rohingya refugee camp populations in Bangladesh 

on the border with Myanmar. Bangladesh and Myanmar have agreed to start 

repatriating Rohingya refugees in two months. (AFP Photo/Gal ROMA)

Myanmar, meanwhile, has bristled at the growing chorus of global criticism.

Aung San Suu Kyi, a one-time heroine of the human rights movement whose halo has been badly tarnished, shot back Thursday at foreign interference in what she said was a "bilateral" issue.

"Western countries as well the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) had portrayed the matter as an international issue by passing resolutions at the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations," her office said in a statement.

"The principled position of Myanmar is that issues that emerge between neighbouring countries must be resolved amicably through bilateral negotiations."

Thursday's agreement is a "win-win situation for both countries", the statement added.

'Horrendous atrocities'

The tentative deal comes the day after US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who met with Suu Kyi in Myanmar last week, issued Washington’s strongest-yet denunciation.

"It is clear that the situation in northern Rakhine state constitutes ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya," Tillerson said.

"No provocation can justify the horrendous atrocities that have ensued."

The UN Children's Fund, UNICEF, has estimates that 25,000 children in the 

overcrowded Rohingya camps are suffering from severe malnutrition (AFP

 Photo/Munir UZ ZAMAN)

The tide of desperate humanity that has poured over the riverine border into Bangladesh is thick with horrifying stories of rape, murder and arson at the hands of Myanmar's military and Buddhist mobs.

The Burmese army insists its crackdown has been proportionate and targeted only at Rohingya rebels.

Thursday's outline deal offered no detail on how many Rohingya will be allowed back and how long the process will take.

The European Union's top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, said it was "an important and welcomed step towards addressing one of the worst humanitarian and human rights crises of our times".

Mogherini, who visited Myanmar on Monday, urged both nations to act swiftly to enable the "voluntary, safe and dignified return" of the refugees, in a statement.

Rights groups have raised concerns about the repatriation plans, including questioning where the minority will be resettled after hundreds of their villages were razed, and how their safety will be ensured in a country where anti-Muslim sentiment is surging.

'Won't go back'

The stateless Rohingya have been the target of communal violence and vicious anti-Muslim sentiment in mainly Buddhist Myanmar for years.

They have also been systematically oppressed by the government, which stripped the minority of citizenship and severely restricts their movement, as well as their access to basic services.

More than half a million Rohingya have fled across the frontier into Bangladesh 

since August, carrying harrowing stories of violence (AFP Photo/Munir UZ ZAMAN)

Tensions erupted into bouts of bloodshed in 2012 that pushed more than 100,000 Rohingya into grim displacement camps.

Despite the squalid conditions in the overcrowded camps in Bangladesh, many of the refugees say they are reluctant to return to Myanmar unless they are granted full citizenship.

"We won't go back to Myanmar unless all Rohingya are granted citizenship with full rights like any other Myanmar nationals," said Abdur Rahim, 52, who was a teacher at a government-run school in Buthidaung in Myanmar's Rakhine state before fleeing across the border.

"We won't return to any refugee camps in Rakhine," he told AFP in Bangladesh.

The signing of the deal came ahead of a highly-anticipated visit to both nations from Pope Francis, who has been outspoken about his sympathy for the plight of the Rohingya.

The latest unrest occurred after Rohingya rebels attacked police posts on August 25.

The army backlash rained violence across northern Rakhine, with refugees recounting nightmarish scenes of soldiers and Buddhist mobs slaughtering villagers and burning down entire communities.

The military denies all allegations but has restricted access to the conflict zone.

Suu Kyi's government has blocked visas for a UN-fact finding mission tasked with probing accusations of military abuse.

A tiny outpost of Catholicism in Myanmar prepares for visit by Pope Francis in 2018 pic.twitter.com/ftOjT7ScRP

— AFP news agency (@AFP) November 23, 2017

Jordan's Queen Rania sits with Rohingya children inside a temporary school run by UNICEF during her visit to a refugee camp in Bangladesh

Jordan's Queen Rania sits with Rohingya children inside a temporary school run by UNICEF during her visit to a refugee camp in Bangladesh pic.twitter.com/16DA7yw797

— AFP news agency (@AFP) October 23, 2017

Messi sends autographed jerseys to his little Afghan fan

Yahoo – AFP, 25 February 2016

Afghan boy Murtaza Ahmadi proudly wears one of the jerseys sent by his idol

Lionel Messi (AFP Photo/Mahdy Mehraeen)

Kabul (AFP) - Argentine football star Lionel Messi has sent not one, but two jerseys to the five-year-old Afghan boy who became an Internet sensation last month when he was pictured wearing a plastic bag with "Messi" scrawled on it in marker pen.

Murtaza Ahmadi travelled with his family from eastern Ghazni province to Kabul to receive the gifts sent by Messi through UNICEF, where he is a goodwill ambassador.

Afghan boy Murtaza Ahmadi is

hoping to meet his idol Lionel

Messi (AFP Photo/Shah Marai)

"Murtaza couldn't stop smiling. He kept repeating: I love Messi," UNICEF Afghanistan spokesman Denise Shepherd-Johnson told AFP.

Messi autographed the jerseys, writing "With much love" in Spanish on them, and added a football to the treasure trove, UNICEF said.

Purchasing a Messi jersey was beyond the means of Murtaza's poor family, members of the persecuted ethnic Hazara minority living in volatile Ghazni, near Kabul.

His elder brother Homayoun, 15, improvised the blue-and-white-striped plastic shirt with Messi's name scrawled in black marker, and posted the photos of Murtaza wearing it on Facebook in mid-January.

The image touched a chord with football fans around the world, and earned Murtaza the sobriquet "little Messi" on social media.

The Afghan Football Federation had said Messi was in contact with them to arrange a meeting with Murtaza as soon as possible, with the Spanish embassy in Kabul telling AFP it would do whatever possible to facilitate.

Afghan boy Murtaza Ahmadi earned the nickname "little Messi" 

after pictures went viral of him wearing an improvised shirt made out

of a plastic bag (AFP Photo)

But a source close to Messi's entourage said earlier this month they could neither confirm nor deny the speculation regarding a possible meeting.

Setting up a meeting in Afghanistan, in the grip of a fierce Taliban insurgency, is fraught with security challenges.

Football and cricket are the two most popular sports in the war-ravaged country -- but sports were rarely played under Taliban rule, and the football stadium in Kabul was a notorious venue for executions, stonings and mutilations.

Red tape delays Nepal quake disaster aid

Yahoo – AFP, May 3, 2015

Red tape delays Nepal quake disaster aid

Kathmandu (AFP) - The UN's humanitarian chief has said she is "extremely concerned" that Nepal's customs authorities are slowing the delivery of earthquake aid, as the death toll from the disaster crossed 7,000 on Sunday.

After the government ruled out finding more survivors buried in the ruins of the capital Kathmandu, the focus was shifting to delivering aid to families and others in far-flung areas of the devastated nation.

But the UN's head of humanitarian affairs Valerie Amos said she was worried the foreign aid pouring into Nepal in the wake of the impoverished country's deadliest earthquake in more than 80 years was being held up by red tape.

"I was extremely concerned to hear reports that customs was taking such a long time," Amos told AFP in Kathmandu on Saturday, saying she had asked Prime Minister Sushil Koirala to speed up customs clearance for aid materials.

"He has undertaken to ensure that happens, so I hope that from now we will see an improvement in those administrative issues."

A local official said on Sunday that police have found more than 50 bodies, including those of six foreigners, in the popular Langtang trekking region.

Another 100 foreign tourists are still feared to be missing in Langtang.

Uddav Prasad Bhattarai, chief officer of Rasuwa district that forms part of Langtang, said the bodies had been found in different places, including buried under debris, in recent days in the region hit by a quake-triggered avalanche.

"We have pulled out 51 bodies from the Langtang area so far, six of them are tourists. We estimate that about 100 foreigners might still be missing in the area," Bhattarai said.

"Our priority was to get the survivors out. We rescued over 350 people, about a half of them were tourists or guides," he told AFP in Rasuwa north of Kathmandu.

The 7.8-magnitude quake wreaked a trail of death and destruction when it erupted around midday eight days ago, reducing much of Kathmandu to rubble and even triggering a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest.

The death toll from the disaster has hit 7,040, according to the Emergency Operations Centre, with more than 14,000 injured. More than 100 were also killed in India and China.

Although multiple teams of rescuers from more than 20 countries have been using sniffer dogs and heat-seeking equipment to find survivors in the rubble, noone has been pulled out alive since Thursday evening.

"Rescue operations are still under way, but focus has shifted to providing relief," home ministry spokesman Laxmi Prasad Dhakal told AFP on Sunday.

"Many far flung villages have been affected," he said, adding that there was still an "acute shortage" of tents for the hundreds of thousands left homeless.

Planes loaded with relief supplies from around the world were pouring into landlocked Nepal, but there have been numerous reports of many getting stuck at Kathmandu's small international airport, and even customs officials stopping trucks filled with aid from crossing into the country from neighbouring India.

The manager of Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport said very heavy planes were being barred from landing because of concerns about the condition of the single runway after the quake and a series of strong aftershocks.

"We have issued a notice saying that aircraft with a total weight exceeding 196 tonnes will not be allowed to land at Kathmandu airport," Birendra Prasad Shrestha told AFP.

"There are no visible cracks in the runway but there have been so many tremors recently that we have to take precautions - we don't know what's happening below the surface.

"This runway is the only lifeline for Kathmandu -- if it goes, everything goes."

Mountainous terrain

The exact scale of the disaster was still to emerge, with the mountainous terrain in the vast Himalayan nation complicating the relief effort.

With relief workers still to reach many areas, the Red Cross has warned of "total devastation" in far-flung areas, including in the hardest-hit Sindhupalchowk region, northeast of Kathmandu, where whole villages have been destroyed.

The latest UN's situation report says teams that have arrived in another devastated district, Gorkha, have discovered a "dire need for shelter, particularly tents and blankets".

"Access to some remote villages remains a key challenge as many landing zones are unsafe due to debris, altitude and current weather conditions," the report also says.

"Road access is limited. Some remote villages can only be accessed by helicopters."

In Kathmandu, tens of thousands of survivors have been living out in the open in the eight days since the quake, having either lost their homes or fearful that aftershocks could bring teetering buildings to the ground.

The UN says more than 160,000 homes have been destroyed and another 143,000 damaged.

"We are not living in this tent out of choice. We are here because we have nowhere to go," said Dhiraj Thakur who has been camped out since the quake in Tundikhel Maidan, an open area in the centre of the city.

The UN children's fund UNICEF has warned of a race against time to avert an outbreak of disease among the 1.7 million youngsters estimated to be living in the worst-hit areas, with monsoon rains just a few weeks away.

Funchu Tamang, 101, sits on a bed in a hospital in 

Nuwakot district on May 3, 2015 (AFP Photo)

Related Articles:

101-year-old rescued after Nepal quake as fears grow in rural areas
Nepal's isolated Chepang minority need support

China's armed police enter Nepal to aid quake relief

Nepal excludes possibility of survivors in rubble, to concentrate on aid for victims

Nepal's leaders have admitted that the probability of finding survivors under the rubble after last week's earthquake is now very low. The government has said it will move its focus to providing food and supplies.

Deutsche Welle, 2 May 2015

One week after the disaster, Nepal's government was still struggling to come to terms with the extent of the tragedy. "We are trying our best in rescue and relief work, but now I don't think that there is any possibility of findingsurvivors under the rubble," home ministry spokesman Laxmi Prasad Dhakal told reporters.

"While we will try to find the survivors if we have reports of any such possibility, I think it will be very hard to find one under the rubble a week after the quake. It would be a surprise," he added.

The death toll in Nepal has now reached 6,621, and around 100 victims have died in regions of India that border Nepal. The administration estimated the number of injured at 14,023. The European Union (EU) also reported 1,000 missing, most of whom had been climbing in the Everest region.

"They are missing but we don't know what their status is," EU ambassador to Nepal Rensje Teerink told reporters, although the number of those dead could top 50, the German news agency DPA said. Another official said the majority was likely to be safe, but that difficult terrain and poor communications were making it difficult to locate their whereabouts.

Relief efforts not enough

According to the UN, a quarter of Nepal's population or 8 million people had been affected by the quake and around 2.8 million were displaced. Some 1.7 million children needed assistance in the worst-hit areas, and UNICEF warned that it was a race against time to avert the outbreak of disease.

#NepalQuake: latest from @UNOCHA on the numbers you need to know http://t.co/tyGkpa6pmH pic.twitter.com/cRGkO2TODM

— United Nations (@UN) 1 mei 2015

Meanwhile, Nepalese officials lamented the status of relief efforts, saying many people were unhappy about not getting help. Around 1,000 villagers in Sindhupalchowk were said to be still waiting for aid. "No one has come to help us," a 33-year-old school teacher told the Agence France-Presse news agency. "The cars and the aid trucks just drive by. How will we manage now?"

Donors were also asked to send money if they could not send things that were immediately necessary. "We have things like tuna fish and mayonnaise. What good are those things for us? We need grains, salt and sugar," Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat told reporters Friday. Mahat said the government urgently needed 400,000 tents and had been able to provide only 29,000.

Hope and support

While people struggled to come to terms with the destruction, there were also incidents that spread hope among the victims. A Nepalese man and a French woman were finally married in Kathmandu Saturday, after the earthquake last week had forced them to reschedule their wedding. "I hope we are bringing hope that life is going on and there is love and solidarity and sharing and caring from each other," France's Eugenie Prouvost told The Associated Press.

A young Nepalese couple was blessed with a healthy baby at an Israeli emergency hospital - a surprise for the mother, who was heavily pregnant at the time of the earthquake and had to run out of the house. "When the quake struck, I was thinking: will we survive?" the baby's father said. "Now we're safe. It's good," he added.

Search and rescue teams got their biggest surprise, however, after a 4-month-old baby was found alive under the debris.

4-month-old baby rescued alive from debris in earthquake-hit Nepal http://t.co/SIpZPevcMU pic.twitter.com/ihxGwOLUFj

— NDTV (@ndtv) 29 april 2015

mg/rc (AP, dpa, AFP)

Related Article:

Kathmandu's 'living goddess' survives quake

The Kumari, considered a living goddess, attends festivities on the last day of

 the 2014 Rato Machindranath chariot festival on the outskirts of Kathmandu (AFP

Photo/Prakash Mathema)

Aid agencies prepare 'massive' operations in quake-hit Nepal

Yahoo – AFP, Agnes Pedrero, 27 April 2015

A woman carries a child next to collapsed houses in Bhaktapur, on the 

outskirts of Kathmandu, on April 27, 2015 (AFP Photo/Prakash Mathema)

Humanitarian agencies said Monday they were preparing a large-scale aid operation to earthquake-ravaged Nepal, with more relief planes arriving in the coming hours.

"This will be a... massive operation," Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN's World Food Programme, told AFP.

Officials say more than 4,000 people are now known to have died, the overwhelming majority in Nepal -- making it the quake-prone Himalayan nation's deadliest disaster in more than 80 years.

Indian National Disaster Response

 Force (NDRF) personnel prepare to be

 flown to Nepal to provide assistance, at

 the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose

 International Airport in Kolkata on April 27,

2015 (AFP Photo/Dibyangshu Sarkar)

WFP experts arrived in Kathmandu on Sunday to evaluate the situation, and the agency estimates shelter and medical equipment should be the first priority.

The World Health Organization said Monday it had already distributed medical supplies to cover the health needs of 80,000 people for three months in the country.

"An additional five emergency health kits are being flown in along with surgical kits and trauma bags to meet the immediate health needs. There is an urgent need to replenish medical stocks to support the emergency response efforts," said Poonam Khetrapal, WHO's regional director for Southeast Asia.

But with food also expected to quickly run scarce, WFP has "mobilised all of our food stocks in the region," Byrs said.

WFP is loading a plane with rations of high energy biscuits in Dubai, and Byrs said it would arrive in Nepal Tuesday.

They would be distributed to survivors in the country, taken by truck where possible, but due to the massive destruction, "the relief cargo may need to be airlifted," she added.

The UN refugee agency meanwhile said it was on Monday sending nearly 20,000 plastic sheets and some 8,000 solar lamps.

About half the stocks were already in place in Nepal and the rest were being flown from Dubai to Kathmandu on Monday afternoon on a cargo plane donated by the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, UNHCR said.

WFP experts are meanwhile poring over satellite images to estimate how many people have been affected by the disaster, Byrs said.

She said the worst-hit area was in "an agricultural zone that is home to between two and three million people."

Millions affected

WFP has been working in Nepal since 1964, and the agency had before the quake already been planning to assist some 500,000 people who do not have enough to eat.

An employee of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) fills packages with medical 

aid supplies to be send to earthquake-ravaged Nepal, in Merignac on April 27, 

2015 (AFP Photo/Jean-Pierre Muller)

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) launched an emergency appeal for 33.4 million Swiss francs (32 million euros, $35 million) to cope with the crisis and cater for around 75,000 people over the next 18 months.

But it said the number of people affected was far higher with between 4.6 and 6.6 million people thought to be living within a 100-kilometre radius of the epicentre.

"We already had 19,000 prepositioned kits" in Nepal, IFRC chief Elhadj As Sy told reporters in Geneva, adding that they included non-food items like kitchen sets and tarpaulin sheets.

"Charter flights have also been organised with relief items. We hope to get them landed as soon as possible," he said.

Simon Eccleshall, who heads disaster and crisis management at IFRC, said the "next 72 hours is critical" for people trapped under rubble, as rains could flood the debris.

The UN children's agency has meanwhile warned that the quake had left nearly one million youngsters in desperate need of assistance.

UNICEF cautioned that the thousands of children camping out in the open in the capital Kathmandu were particularly at risk of disease.

UNICEF said it was mobilising staff and sending two cargo flights with 120 tonnes of humanitarian supplies, including medical and hospital supplies, tents and blankets.

Related Article:

Dutch search and rescue team leads Kathmandu relief efforts - New

British girl leads Guardian campaign to end female genital mutilation

17-year-old Fahma Mohamed calls on Michael Gove to ensure teachers and parents are informed about horrors of FGM

• Sign the petition against female genital mutilation here

theguardian.com, Alexandra Topping, Wednesday 5 February 2014

A 17-year-old British student is calling on Michael Gove to help end female genital mutilation in the UK.

She wants the education secretary to write to every headteacher in the country asking them to train and inform teachers and parents about the horrors of the practice, which has affected an estimated 66,000 women and girls in the UK.

As the face of the Guardian's new campaign to have FGM recognised as a key government priority, Fahma Mohamed, one of nine daughters in a Muslim Somali family that came to Britain when she was seven, believes Gove could do more to help curtail the barbaric practice.

She adds her voice to a broad coalition of global charities and campaigners who have joined the Guardian to ask the education secretary to write to headteachers of all primary and secondary schools, urging them to flag up the dangers of FGM before the summer holidays, when girls are at the greatest risk.

"If every single headteacher was given the right information, we could reach every single girl who is at risk of FGM," said Fahma, from Bristol. "We could convince these families not to send their daughters abroad and help those girls at risk."

According to government figures more than 20,000 British girls are thought to be at risk of being cut every year but, despite previous government promises to stop FGM, experts have warned the Guardian that girls are not only still being taken abroad to be cut during the holiday "cutting season", but are also being mutilated in Britain.

A coalition of medical groups, trade unions and human rights organisations recently estimated that there were 66,000 UK victims of FGM in the UK and more than 24,000 girls under the age of 15 were at risk. Victims can be as young as just a few weeks old.

The Guardian spoke to Manika, who was eight years old when she was mutilated in the Gambia. She is now 25 and lives in Scotland. "It really hurt. It's like taking a knife and cutting someone's flesh," she said. After suffering physical complications, she is now terrified of having sex. "I can't let my body move properly so that I can do it. I still have this at the back of my mind … it makes me feel scared."

For her, the consequences are lifelong, and catastrophic. "After I saw the blade, I knew they would definitely hurt me," she said. "This is just like you're taking somebody's life. It's just like you're taking a gun and shooting somebody to death. It's just like it feels for me."

Experts told the Guardian that some families, put off by expensive air travel, were clubbing together to pay for cutters to travel to Britain to mutilate their girls in "cutting parties" here. "We have found out that there is a lot of individuals carrying out this process in Scotland and it's becoming quite popular for people from other countries to come here to get the process carried out," said the MSP Margaret McCulloch, of the Holyrood equal opportunities committee. Reports that "cutters" are at work, some operating out of expensive private clinics, have come from other major cities including London, Birmingham and Bristol, said Sarah McCulloch, from the charity Agency for Culture and Change Management. "Wherever communities [that practise FGM] are residing, it is a problem," she said.

More than 140 million women and girls worldwide have suffered FGM, with up to 98% of girls mutilated in some African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Traditionally seen as a rite of passage carried out to keep girls "pure" before marriage, it is condemned by campaigners as a means of controlling women's fertility and sexual desire.

Despite three decades of legislation against FGM in the UK, there is yet to be a single prosecution. DCS Keith Niven, the Metropolitan police's lead on child abuse, called on members of FGM-practising communities to come forward. "I need information, I need people to tell me who it is that is committing these crimes," he said.

The lack of prosecutions is a "failure" that has to be addressed, admitted the Home Office minister Norman Baker, speaking before the campaign's launch. "I'm hopeful we can defeat this in the UK and I think we are making progress. The next 12 months will be important. I'm pretty confident we will get some prosecutions," said Baker, the government lead of FGM. New cases were being "seriously investigated" while some previously closed cases had been reopened, he added.

In France, activists accused Britain of cowardice, arguing that France had come close to eradicating FGM by carrying out controversial physical health checks on children and arresting parents if there was a suspicion that a girl had been mutilated.

Naana Otoo Oyortey, the executive director of Forward UK, which has been central to the FGM debate in the UK and has joined the Guardian's campaign, said it could play a significant role in raising awareness of FGM. "We want the education secretary to come out and say work really needs to be done in school," she said. "Why are we talking about prosecuting parents before we have even sent out information? There has to be a change of heart, and that has to start in schools."

Fahma, who has seen at firsthand among her friends and family the devastation that FGM can cause, said that with the commitment of the government and action from the education secretary, eradicating FGM in a generation was achievable. "We are not going to be quiet. We are not going to shut up," she said. "It has taken us this long just to get people talking about it – we don't care how long it takes to make people listen."

Related Articles:

Fighting female genital mutilation in Africa

UN hails drop in female genital mutilation

UN committee calls for ban on female genital mutilation

Dutch doctors: circumcision should be stopped

Reversing female circumcision remains taboo

Female genital mutilation causes aggression

Female genital mutilation (WHO)

Kryon Q&A

Question: Dear and beloved Kryon: What should we know about "Brit-Mila" (Jewish circumcision)?

Answer: All circumcision was based on commonsense health issues of the day, which manifested itself in religious-based teaching. That basically is what made people keep doing it. This eighth-day-from-birth ritual is no more religious today than trimming your fingernails (except that Brit-Mila is only done once, and it hurts a bit more).

It's time to start seeing these things for what they are. Common sense is not static. It's dynamic, and related to the culture of the time. Yesterday's common sense about health changed greatly with the discovery of germs. It changed again with practices of cleanliness due to the discovery of germs, and so on. Therefore, we would say that it really doesn't make a lot of difference in today's health practices. It's done almost totally for cultural historic and traditional purposes and holds no energy around it other than the obvious intent of the tradition.

This is also true for a great deal of the admonishments of the Old Testament regarding food and cleanliness, and even the rules of the neighborhood (such as taking your neighbor's life if he steals your goat, or selling your daughter in slavery if you really need the money... all found in scripture). The times are gone where these things matter anymore, yet they're still treated with reverence and even practiced religiously in some places. They're now only relics of tradition, and that's all. If you feel that you should honor a tradition, then do it. If not, then don't. It's not a spiritual or health issue any longer.

Be the boss of your own body and your own traditions. Follow what your spiritual intuition tells you is appropriate for your own spiritual path and health.