Story: Vincent Adedze, Karaga
Healthcare providers and other stakeholders in the health sector have expressed concern over what they termed “the high infant mortality rates in the country”, describing it as unacceptable.
According to health experts, malnutrition among children under five years is a major contributory factor to the problem, which is equally preventable.
Stakeholders in the health sector have, therefore, advised parents and school authorities to, among other things, ensure that children take in foods such as beans, fish, eggs, meat, green leaves, yellow-coloured fruits and vegetables to enhance the health status of the children.
Continuous breast-feeding from zero to two years among children has also been advocated as a panacea to reducing malnutrition and infant mortality rates in the country to the barest minimum.
According to the Ghana Health Service, currently, more than half of all child deaths in Ghana have malnutrition as the underlying cause and that phenomenon contributes to the high under-five infant mortality rates of 111 per 1,000 live births in the country. Additionally, about a quarter of all children under five years are underweight while a third are stunted.
In view of the debilitating effect of malnutrition on child survival, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in collaboration with the Nutrition Unit of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), has developed an evidence-based intervention under the Essential Nutrition Action (ENA) to help improve the lot of children.
According to the Field Director of the Tamale Office of the UNICEF, Dr Yasmin Hague, “It has been proven that the ENA helps to reduce mortality rates among children under five by at least 25 per cent”.
According to him, it was unacceptable for 65,000 children under five years to die every year in the country from preventable diseases and limited access to basic necessities of life such as good food, potable water and sanitation.
“UNICEF supports the introduction of ready to use therapeutic food for severely malnourished children in regions such as Northern, Upper West, Central and Greater Accra ,” Dr Haque stated.
The Minister of Health, Major Courage Quashigah(retd), in a speech read on his behalf at a durbar at Karaga to inaugurate this year’s national Child Health Promotion Week, said a new health policy had been developed to encourage low fat diet, eating of fruits and vegetable and exercising the body regularly to help develop the health of both adults and children.
The Week was instituted in 2004 to, among other things, reduce under five morbidity and mortality rates, increase awareness about interventions, as well as educate the public about pertinent child health issues. It had the theme, “Good nutrition: A key to child growth and development”, with a slogan, “You are what you eat” as part of the educational campaigns to increase awareness about the need for the communities to make nutrition a top priority.
Major Quashigah hinted that “the ministry of health will continue to provide funding for the Vitamin A Supplementation Programme in order to increase coverage and improve child survival”. He, however, expressed regret that after several decades of implementation of various interventions to help improve on child health in the country, children were still confronted with numerous social and health challenges.
He said the importance of exclusive breast-feeding could not be over-emphasised, since infants who were breast-fed show better responses to immunisation and the breast milk also protected them from diarrhoea and upper respiratory tract infections.
The minister entreated stakeholders to include regenerative health and nutrition messages in all interactions with the public.
The District Chief Executive for Karaga, Mr Baba Wahab, said field data on nutrition baseline survey conducted by the Karaga District Health Directorate revealed that 53.3 per cent of children under five in the district were malnourished and out of that, 7.8 per cent were severely malnourished.
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