Health

From 1st to 7th August each year, World Breastfeeding Week highlights the critical importance of nursing for children across the globe. This year, the commemoration is accompanied by a fact sheet with new data from the 2019 Global Breastfeeding Scorecard, which revealed, among other things, that only four out of 10 babies in 2018 were exclusively breastfed. Babies in rural areas were breastfed more than for their urban counterparts and at 23.9 per cent, upper-middle-income countries had the lowest breastfeeding rates. While the benefits of breastfeeding ...

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Patricia Pelosi, has admonished Ghana to work assiduously to ensure that all forms of diseases are eliminated in the country. She said it is also incumbent on the West African nation to ensure that all have access to good quality healthcare, stressing that healthcare is a right for everyone, not just a ...

The Ghana Health Service (GHS) says steps are in place to ban the use of mobile phones among health workers. The step, according to the Director General of the GHS, Dr Anthony Nsiah-Asare, has become necessary due to the numerous complaints on how health professionals spend time on their phones while attending to patients. According to him, the new directive ...

One million new sexually transmitted infections (STIs) occur every single day, the World Health Organization has estimated. That means more than 376 million new cases annually of four infections – chlamydia, gonorrhoea, trichomoniasis, and syphilis. The WHO highlights a lack of progress in stopping the spread of STIs, and says its figures are a “wake-up call”. Experts are particularly concerned ...

The Ghana Nurses and Midwives’ Association has called on the government to review the conditions of service of nurses and Midwives that serve in rural communities across the country. According to the Association, even though nurses generally go through difficult moments in delivering healthcare, their counterparts in rural areas go through harrowing challenges all in their bid to make healthcare ...

The Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) and the Ministry of Health (MoH) are rallying support from stakeholders and the public to help wage a war on tobacco smoking, as the harmful health impact of tobacco is killing hundreds of people annually. According to the FDA, although the prevalence of tobacco smoking in the country reduced from 3.6 per cent in ...

Although more than half of Ghana’s 30 million population live with one form of mental or intellectual disorder or another, the Mental Health Authority (MHA) is lamenting over inadequate funds to keep the only three mental health facilities in the country running effectively. The issue of lack of funds has been persistent for a long time and this, according to ...

The Chief Executive Officer of the Mental Health Authority, Dr. Akwesi Osei has reiterated the need to establish a levy that would provide the needed funding to service mental health care in the country. According to him, they lack resources at the Authority and stressed that government has failed to respond to their calls after several assurances. He made this ...

Foods sold at sprawling markets in Accra, have been found to have very poor nutritional quality, according to research by Food Safety Consultant, Dr. Mavis Owureku-Asare. Dr. Owureku-Asare mentioned tomatoes, oranges, pineapples, garden eyes, cocoyam leaves (Kontomire) and also looked at proteins like shrimps as well as fish powder as sold at Agbogbloshie, Dome, Kaneshie, Makola and Okaishie markets. She explained to ...

Yesterday, April 25, was World Malaria Day with the theme “Zero malaria starts with me”. The United States, through the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) joined forces with the National Malaria Control Program and other malaria partners to celebrate the encouraging results achieved in the last 10years. From 2011 to 2016, malaria prevalence in children under five decreased nationally by ...