By Isaac Ato MENSAH
Ashaiman – 5 December, 2018.
The Ministry of Health Ghana has just completed a limited yellow fever vaccination campaign.
I got my shot in Ashaiman of all places.
Hardly do I lose my bearings even in a foreign land. But I got disoriented in Ashaiman even though it was not my first time there.
Let us start at the last stop (?lorry station) when you arrive from Accra.
The heat was unbearable and everything was in disarray.
‘Low intensity riot’, my mentor will say.
I would have failed as an ethnographer; I bought a sachet of “pure” water, stood by the seller, drank it and gave the plastic packaging back to her.
Hardly had she received it when she dropped it on the ground.
‘You’re irritating,’ she must have thought.
I turned and looked around; there were grins on faces.
How did I feel? Uhmmm.
I thought many things about Ghana. Why will bystanders think I was rather odd. Talk about majority carries the vote!
Hardly do we think about getting a shot until we are flying out of here or approaching our borders.
But, dirty shanty sprawling suburbs such as Ashaiman are perfect grounds for yellow fever to fester.
I ended up in Lebanon – a popular part of Ashaiman.
There I met Prince Mohammed, the assembly member for Ema Ohie (he says everyone calls him honourable).
‘We have two teams for the schools’, said Mohammed.
‘Some went to Holy Child, St Patrick, Ashaiman Basic, Don Bosco Senior High…..’, the assemblyman knows his terrain so well.
You are left in no doubt that he directs the Ghana Health Service (GHS) team in his electoral area.
I got the confirmation from Clara Allotey, a community health nurse working under the Ashaiman Municipal Health Directorate.
‘ I don’t have a station’, she explained.
I needed time to wrap my head around that and got it with further probing.
‘I work at Zone 3, Community 12 and Tsui Bleoo (Not the one in Teshie)’, she explained.
‘I walk from Zenu Washing Base to Jericho Bridge on the Gbenu river’, she narrated one of her schedules.
‘So where did you go last week?’, I tried to understand her schedule.
Maybe the proverbial ghost names on the Ghana government payroll had biased my thoughts.
‘Last week, I was sharing Insecticide Treated Mosquito Nets,’ she explained, as she supervised Solomon Addo to give the injections.
But when it came to the locations she went to, the assembly member had to come in to supply the names of the junctions.
We counted about 20 junctions and stopped.
The AM explained that the most effective cohort were basic schools.
‘To make the school vaccination effective, we made the children invite their parents so they were all vaccinated together,’ he explained the strategy and the success.
The challenges came around the municipal boundaries.
Since it was a limited vaccination exercise, some places along the boundaries did not participate.
‘Some churches and a small fraction of Muslim communities said their religion did not agree but we convinced them,’ the AM said.
Yellow fever is a deadly disease caused by the mosquito. Symptoms include high temperature or fever and a jaundiced appearance. The vaccine is needed to prevent the disease in humans. Only the minority of cases are severe.
But the mortality rate may be 25 per cent to 50 per cent among patients who develop bleeding, jaundice and renal disease.
There are no drugs to treat the disease.
Hence vaccination is the most important preventive measure against yellow fever.
Vaccination is one thing, sanitation is another.
Can Ghana achieve both? Certainly….if we are willing.
The Ghana embassy in The Hague has the following statement on its website…….
‘Travellers above nine months old coming (into or leaving Ghana) from countries with risk of Yellow fever transmission are required to have been vaccinated against Yellow fever at least 10 days before and where already vaccinated the duration of vaccination status of not more than 10 years before entering Ghana.’
Then the site states the WHO list of countries at risk and sadly Ghana, together with our West African Neighbours and other African countries, are in there…..right there in the gutter.
‘We major in the minor leagues,’ I hate to repeat my mentor’s words on this occasion, but there we go again.
Feedback; [email protected].
Writers and Shakespeares Ghana Limited exits to be a moral and intellectual guide to the best practice of PR and integrated communications around the world, beginning with Ghana.