Seminar on infectious disease opens
The Director General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Ebenezer Appiah-Dankyirah, has called for more discourse on the legal aspects of handling infectious diseases in the country.
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According to him, such discussion would help to put health professionals in a better position to handle infectious diseases.
Dr Appiah-Dankyirah said this when he opened a two-day seminar on infectious diseases emergencies in Accra.
The seminar, organised by the Galilee International Management Institute, with support from the Global Access Savings and Loans Scheme, is aimed at updating participants’ knowledge in dealing with infectious diseases.
It brought together physicians, nurses, pharmacists, hospital directors and para medics from public and private health facilities from across the country, and other countries including Nigeria and Israel.
Dr Appiah-Dankyirah expressed the hope that the seminar would bring out best practices from across the world to help inform decisions related to the management of infectious diseases in the country.
The Head of the School of Public Health of the University of Haifa in Israel, Professor Manfred Green, who was the lead facilitator at the seminar, called for more collaboration between the government and the private sector, in fighting infectious diseases.
According to him, the emergence of infectious diseases had high impact on public health and there was therefore the need to put in place measures that would mitigate such impacts.
For a country to be fully prepared for such diseases, Prof. Green who spoke on “Ethical, legal and social issues associated with infectious diseases”, said there was the need for the country to be adequately prepared, have good surveillance systems and early detection mechanisms.
He also called for transparency and trust worthiness between the government and the people to ensure that information that came out were well received.
He said some of the social issues that needed to be looked into during the outbreak of infectious diseases included human trafficking, a situation which according to him, became rife in such situations as people took advantage of the distressed situation of the population.
The issue of orphans that arises out of such situations, he said, also needed to be noted.
The Deputy Director General of the GHS, Dr Gloria Quansah Asare, said infectious diseases continued to plague countries and called for a multi-sectorial response to such situations.
