22,000 Live with cerebral palsy — Prof. Badoe
A total of 22,000 of the country’s population live with cerebral palsy, the Head of Neurology and Child Service of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Prof. Eben Badoe, has said.
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“In Ghana, we don’t have accurate statistics but conservative estimates would put it at maybe one with every 300 live births. So that is what we know.
If we extend it then we could probably say that in Ghana we have a population of about 22,000 with cerebral palsy living with us,” he said.
Prof. Badoe was speaking at a Cerebral Palsy Awareness Conference in Accra last Wednesday.
Foundation
The event, which was on the theme: Lending a Helping Hand”, was organised by the Afrakoma Foundation, a non-governmental organisation aimed at raising awareness, among other things, of cerebral palsy.
In talking about the causes, Prof. Badoe said jaundice was another problem when it came to cerebral palsy and that there was the need to look at that very carefully.
Prof. Badoe said children who were born premature also stood a high risk, adding that “if you were born premature, there is a very high risk of developing cerebral palsy”.
Cerebral palsy, he said, was one of the most common causes of physical disability in the modern world, saying that the rate of the problem had risen in spite of the falling prenatal and neonatal mortality rates worldwide.
The Deputy Minister of Health, Tina Mensah, lauded the foundation for helping to raise awareness of cerebral palsy and providing a helping hand to victims.
She said children with the problem required continuous support, adding that the ministry placed value on universal health coverage as a means to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 3 by 2030.
Thus, she said the ministry was committed in maintaining collaborations with all stakeholders to strengthen health systems and to maintain an enabling environment where children diagnosed with cerebral palsy would receive quality health care from competent staff without any hindrance.
Subsidise health care
The Founder of Afrakoma Foundation, Amani-Aminah Iddrisu, called on the government to subsidise the cost of health care for persons living with cerebral palsy.
She said having worked at a centre where children affected by the disease were taken care of, her organisation had realised that the cost of meeting the health needs of children was high, hence the need to subsidise it.
“I have been working with a cerebral palsy centre here in Ghana ….
And I have been working with them for three years now.
The biggest issue that we face at that centre is that the cost of health care is very expensive even though it is a public health care not to talk of the private,” she said.
