The Ghana Health Service has a assured it has put in place a strong surveillance system to prevent outbreak of dengue fever.
According to the Service, qualified persons have been trained to be on alert for this fever as was done for Ebola virus in 2014.
This follows an issued by the Service, following an outbreak of the dengue fever in Burkina Faso.
The Western Regional Health Director, Dr. Emmanuel Kojo Tenkrang, spoke to Citi News and assured that, “Ghana has a very strong surveillance system. The surveillance systems that we have in this country are able to detect an outbreak so if you go into our communities, we have the community surveillance volunteers.”
“If you remember what we did during the Ebola outbreak, it is the same thing. So at the community level, we have a surveillance team. At the sub-district level. We have a surveillance team. At the regional level and national level, there is also a surveillance team.”
In a worst case scenario, Dr. Tenkrang noted that, “we may get one or two cases but it won’t escalate as we are having in other countries.”
Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral disease that has rapidly spread in all regions of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in recent years.
The infection causes flu-like illness, and occasionally develops into a potentially lethal complication called severe dengue.
According to WHO, the global incidence of dengue has grown dramatically in recent decades. About half of the world’s population is now at risk. Dengue is found in tropical and sub-tropical climates worldwide, mostly in urban and semi-urban areas.
Severe Dengue (also known as Dengue Haemorrhagic Fever) was first recognized in the 1950s during dengue epidemics in the Philippines and Thailand.
Today, severe dengue affects most Asian and Latin American countries and has become a leading cause of hospitalization and death among children and adults in these regions.
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)
