A medical officer has appealed to Ghanaians to be vigilant in the fight against the Ebola disease since it takes a single positive case for an entire community to get infected.
Dr. Leveana Gyimah, the leader of the mental health team of 42 Ghanaian health workers who traveled to Sierra Leone and Liberia to help combat Ebola, said this in an interview with the GNA when the team arrived at the Kotoka International Airport.
The mental health team was a sub unit of the 42-member team.
Dr. Gyimah, who was with the Liberian group, said there was the need to ensure that all the measures needed to prevent the disease were taken with a strong sense of urgency.
“It is just about strongly revisiting what should be done. Sometimes it is about your district. The things needed should be provided by the authorities in the right quantities and at the right time,” he said.
She said although Ebola had raised strong concerns, there were other deadly diseases such as cholera, which could also cause several human deaths and destabilise the society.
Touching on the trip, she said the key reasons for the high levels of Ebola infection in Liberia was lack of adequate awareness during the onset of the disease, weak systems as a result of the civil war as well as a poor human resource base in the health sector.
Dr. Gyimah said in the past, Ebola was only recorded in small communities in East Africa, which made it easy for it to be contained, adding that in the case of Liberia, infected people were mingling with uninfected people in buses and other large social gatherings and this contributed to the rapid spread of the disease.
She said a very relevant fact also was that the education of the public did not seem to have gone down well enough for the citizenry to take precautions.
The 42-member team was trained by the Ministry of Health, and spent three months in the affected areas.
On their way back to Ghana, they were quarantined for 21 days in Cote d’Ivoire to make sure they were free of the virus.
They are to rest for a month before resuming work in their various organizations.
