Health experts search for cause of students deaths

A team of medical experts from the Disease Surveillance Department of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) has begun full-scale investigation into the mysterious deaths of students at Kumasi Academy Senior High School.

Four students had so far died under strange circumstances since last week, with the last of these deaths occurring on Tuesday.

The Ashanti Regional Minister, Simon Osei-Mensah, announced this after an emergency meeting held by Regional Security Council (REGSEC) with the GHS and the Ghana Education Service (GES) to discuss a contingency plan to deal with the situation, which was fueling public anxiety.

Many parents are increasingly getting anxious with reports that some of them are rushing to pick their children home.

Mr. Osei-Mensah, however, urged everybody to remain calm as they did everything to bring things under control.

The students, teachers and non-teaching staff he said, were being screened as they put in place preventive measures to stop whatever disease had struck the school from spreading.

The Metropolitan Health Directorate, Dr. Alberta Nyarko said apart from the four deaths, 39 other students of the school, had shown signs of fever.

Those students, she added, had been admitted at various health facilities – Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Kumasi South and KNUST Hospitals for observation and treatment.

She called for the public to stop speculating about the cause of the deaths. They were yet to identify the cause.

She indicated that blood samples of the deceased students had been collected and sent to the Noguchi Memorial Research Institute for further investigation.

This is the second time within a space of about seven months that the school had been hit by mysterious deaths.

Meningitis was blamed for the earlier deaths that happened in May.