The purpose of this article is to draw light to the need to prevent disease in our society. We are an emerging economy; we need our workforce to be able to drive the country to where we dream it to be. Sickness is not good for our country, nor any other.
According to the W.H.O., infectious diseases are one of the leading causes of death in our part of our world, especially among children. The strange part of the problem is that, these deaths are very preventable! Everybody knows about malaria so let’s start from there. A huge portion of the cases in our O.P.D.’s are malaria related. You can imagine how much of our scarce resources we spend to treat something that shouldn’t be a problem in the first place. Also bear in mind that sick people don’t work, and we lose money.
We can invest some money into preventing this disease: by simply eliminating the vector Anopheles spp. We need a nationwide approach or better still, a continent-wide spraying exercise. In addition, we can spend more resources on research into developing a vaccine. A vaccine for malaria would be the best solution we have for this problem. I think we need more places like Noguchi Memorial Institute. Malaria is our problem, we must face it!
Included in the list of infectious diseases are the nuisance caused by helminthes (worms). Larva migrans (movement of worms through the body and their exit through orifices) and other disorders caused by worms are very uncomfortable. No child deserves this! We need to do more to protect our children. It’s important to cover every child in deworming exercises, and it’s much more important to provide portable water for every citizen now! You would be surprised how many people would not get sick if we provided everybody with treated water. We would then have more money to build schools, etc.
A very important point in the prevention of diseases, especially infectious disease is eating well (balanced diets). Malnutrition is the leading cause of immune depression in the world. Yes, not eating well leaves you not so different from and HIV/AIDS patient. Immune depression in any form leaves you vulnerable to any disease causing organism, even the ones that are beneficial to immune competent persons. And guess what? A good number of Ghanaians are malnourished. By simply providing access to good food to our people, we can prevent a lot of what kills many of us.
According to our big brother, the W.H.O., the number one cause of death in the developed world is heart-related disease. In our country, these come somewhere below infections disease. But any way, it also kills a lot of us.
One major problem is hypertension, the silent killer. If you do feel something at all, it would be headache, dizziness or something else you would rubbish off. Before you know it, you’re close to dying or even dead. How to diagnose it: taking your blood pressure consistently for a couple of days. A nurse trainee would be able to do this diagnosis. If we put up programs to detect this disease early enough in our society, we would save a lot of lives. For the prevention part, cut down your salt intake, quit smoking, reduce or stop drinking alcohol, do frequent physical exercises and check your weight. These measures will help you prevent or reduce the risk of many heart-related diseases.
Now let’s talk about Diabetes mellitus. It’s a metabolic-endocrine disease in which the pancreas is no longer efficient in controlling the sugar level in the blood. How do you know you are diabetic? If you notice you eat too much and/or too frequently, drink too much water or too frequently, urinate frequently and/or notice you’re losing weight, see your doctor. It’s very important we design screening programs for the entire population to detect this disease early. It’s a very terrible disease. The best you can do to help yourself from getting these diseases is trying not to get infected with any pathogen, watch your weight and see your doctor for screening often.
It’s now time for neoplasies (cancers and tumors). In our country, breast and cervical cancer are the leading causes of death by cancer in women. Our constitution says women and children need special care and protection. Let’s see what we can do to protect our women from breast and cervical cancer. Self-examination is important in breast cancer detection. Do it every at least every month a few days after your menses. If you notice anything strange, find a doctor. We need to introduce a mammography program, at least at the district level, for our women, with at least a scan every year.
For cervical cancer, a good program will the very cheap Pap smear every 3 years for every woman 25 years and above. We could also vaccinate them against the Human Papilloma Virus (one of the agents that can cause cervical cancer). Use a condom when you have sex!
Last but not the least; I’d like to commend the G.H.S. and associates for their immunization programs. Ghanaians are proud of you. Don’t rest. Make sure every person who deserves it gets a vaccine, especially children. We need to take our health very seriously. We are all we’ve got. It’s far more convenient, cheaper and reasonable to prevent disease (or other thing) than to cure it. You have the right to quality health care, fight for it!
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Prevention Is Better Than Cure