President of the Ghana Diabetic Association, Ms Elizabeth Esi Denyoh, has appealed to the government to waive VAT and import duties on diabetes drugs to save the life of a large number of Ghanaians suffering from the disease.
She explained that about one-sixth of the Ghanaian population had diabetes and could not afford the drugs.
Ms Denyoh made this appeal during a free diabetes screening offered by the Lister Hospital and Fertility Centre to staff of Ecobank at Ridge in Accra, as part of activities marking the 10th anniversary celebration of the hospital.
Besides the huge taxes on diabetes drugs, she said the National Health Insurance did not cater for diabetics.
Ms Denyoh suggested that a quota of the annual budget should be devoted to health education.
She said they had petitioned Parliament on the waiving of vat and import duties on diabetes drugs but to no avail.
She said her association currently had 12,000 members and they had been organising outreach programmes to educate people on the disease.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Lister Hospital and Fertility Centre, Dr Edem Hiadzi, advised Ghanaians to lead a healthy lifestyle and live longer.
He explained that the screening was aimed at educating people on ways of preventing diabetes and other diseases.
Dr Hiadzi said it was regretful that many people worked very hard to make much money and forgot about their health.
"What is the sense if you make so much money only to get sick and cannot enjoy your wealth," he wondered.
According to Dr John Jeremiah Kretchy, a physician specialist at the hospital, one out of every five persons in the country had diabetes.
He said the disease affected people across all ages and was brought about by poor lifestyles, obesity, lack of physical exercises and genetics. He explained that diabetes was simply the result of having very high levels of blood sugar in one’s system.
He mentioned symptoms of the disease as tiredness all the time, frequent thirst, blurry vision, vaginal infections, wounds that take a long time to heal and tingling and numbness of parts of the body.
He said diabetes could cause heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, coma and death.
He, therefore, advised people to eat a balanced diet, engage in sound lifestyles, undertake regular physical exercises and check their blood sugar levels and change their eating habits.
