Dr Timothy Letsa, the Brong-Ahafo Regional Director of Ghana Health Service (GHS), on Wednesday alerted of a possible outbreak of cholera in the region this year.
Addressing the opening session of the 2014 Annual Performance Review Meeting of the directorate in Sunyani, he warned that until stringent efforts were made by the local government to improve on sanitation the deadly disease would recur.
The review meeting was on the theme: “Achieving Health Outcomes in the Midst of Resource Constraints”.
Dr Letsa said the region recorded 1,046 cases of cholera which killed 26 people in 2014, explaining that a lot still remained to be done as the environmental and human behavioural factors contributing to cholera outbreak still persisted.
On maternal mortality, Dr Letsa said the directorate continued to grapple with the situation, pointing out that 190 cases of maternal deaths had been recorded in the past two years.
He said because there were more live births in 2013 (71,128) as compared to 68,646 in 2014, the maternal mortality ration had decreased from 138 per 100,000 live births to 134.
“There has been disproportionate number of the maternal deaths occurring in Techiman Hospital (26 cases) in 2014 as compared to other hospitals in the region,” he said.
Dr Letsa emphasised that an increase in sentinel site prevalence at Wenchi pushed the regional HIV sentinel prevalence from 2.0 in 2012 to 2.1 in 2013.
He explained that in efforts to reduce the prevalence of HIV, the directorate tested 96 per cent of women attending antenatal clinics and put almost 99 per cent of those who tested positive on Ant-retroviral therapy.
“In the same vain we have put all the 1,344 tuberculosis patients on treatment during the year 2014,” Dr Letsa said adding that family planning acceptors coverage increased from 35.3 per cent in 2013 to 53.3 percent in 2014.
He, however, expressed worry that Brong-Ahafo had recorded increasing trends in adolescent pregnancies and deliveries.
He said in 2014, 13 suspected cases of Ebola were detected in the region, of which blood samples tested were negative.
He said the directorate constructed a GH¢ 100,000 Ebola isolation center in Sunyani, and appealed to communities and all stakeholders to be volunteers and report suspected cases of Ebola to the nearest health facilities or the trained Ebola detection volunteers in the local communities.
Mr Justice Samuel Adjei, the Deputy Brong-Ahafo Regional Minister, said there had been remarkable increase from 136 functional CHPS compounds that existed at the end of 2012 to over 402 at the moment.
He said the Government, with support from the UK Government, had selected the region to pilot the Ghana Adolescent Reproductive Health project, which is being rolled out in all the 27 municipal and district assemblies.
Mr Adjei said all these and a number of interventions were geared towards improving maternal and child care as well as accelerate the reduction in maternal mortality, and advised health workers to augment such efforts by accepting postings to deprived areas to cater for the health needs of the people.
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