Story: Mary Ankrah
More than two million people in the country are said to be living with diabetes, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Ithemba Foundation of Ghana (IFG), Mr Sampson Denyoh, has said.
He said the World Health Organisation (WHO), had estimated that about 80 per cent of deaths from diabetes, heart disease, cancers and respiratory diseases occur mostly in developing countries.
He said most of the affected people were in their reproductive phase of their life cycle.
Mr Denyoh made this known at a workshop for diabetes educators in Accra to train and educate selected nurses from selected regions and districts across the country.
The workshop was organised by the IFG in partnership with the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), Africa Region, and sponsored by Johnson and Johnson Company Limited (Lifescan) and PALP Pharmaceutical.
The diabetes educators were expected to communicate information to patients with diabetes and help them learn the skills needed to manage the disease on daily basis.
They were also expected to educate the general public in churches, at market places, in schools and workplaces on diet and lifestyle modification.
Mr Denyoh noted that the threat of diabetes was immense and was on the increase.
According to him, undetected and untreated diabetes could result in devastating long-term complications such as blindness, amputation, kidney diseases, stroke and heart attack among other chronic diseases.
He observed that many people die from lack of proper health management coupled with ignorance of the disease.
Mr Denyoh stressed that there was the need for Ghanaians to receive adequate knowledge about the disease in order to reduce its prevalence in both short and long term complications.
“Diabetes affects everybody in some way and it should be the responsibility of all Ghanaians to abreast themselves to the causes of the disease, including knowledge of its acute and chronic diseases stages”, he stated.
The Minister of Health, Mr Alban S. K. Bagbin, in a speech read on his behalf by Mr George Kumi Kyeremah, the director of Nursing and Midwifery Services of the Ministry of Health, said the incidence of the disease was rapidly increasing in Africa with an estimated 10.4 million people living with diabetes in 2007.
Again, he mentioned that the WHO had predicted that diabetes was reaching epidemic proportion worldwide and that currently more than 70 per cent of people living in the low and middle income countries.
He said the disease was expected to increase in Africa by 80 per cent by 2025; this will represent about 18.7 million people who are affected by the disease.
According to the IDF diabetes atlas, “as the continent is going through a rapid epidemiological transition, the burden of the disease would exceed the resources available for health care in most countries of the region”.
Mr Bagbin said Ghana with a doctor population ratio of 1:11, 929, was lacking trained health care personnel capable of dealing with prevention, diagnosis and management of diabetes at all levels of the health care system.
Under the circumstances, it was necessary to design and adopt a national diabetes plan that would rely on a multi-level system of care.
“Training physicians, nurses and other health care staff is a plus in combating the incidence of diabetes and other non-communicable diseases in the country”, he said.
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