Ghana has no defined research agenda on health and environment - Report

Accra, June 3, GNA - Ghana has no clearly defined research agenda specific to health and environment, says a report on Situational Analysis and Needs Assessment (SANA).

It said even though the country has 38 institutions involved in health and environmental issues, they pursue their research agenda only relevant to their mandate.

Dr Edith Clarke, Head of Occupational and Environmental Health of Ghana Health Service (GHS) made this known at a National Priority Setting Workshop on SANA for implementation under the Libreville Declaration. The Declaration was signed and accepted by African Ministers of Health and Environment in Libreville, Gabon in 2008 to undertake new schemes to strengthen environmental sanity that threatened the health of Africans. It advocated an integrated policy approach to addressing inter linked health and environmental issues through the forging of a strategic alliance between the two sectors.

The workshop offered Ghana an opportunity to undertake SANA on two issues in the 11 action points of the declaration, disseminate the findings of SANA and agree on needs and priorities.

At the Libreville meeting it was realised that in Africa more than 2.4 million people who die each year; 23 per cent of the deaths were attributable to avoidable environmental risk factors with women, children, rural poor, disabled with the elderly being the worse affected. The action points include integrating health and environment linkages into policies, strategies, regulations and national development plans, implementing priority inter-sectoral programmes at all levels, strengthening health and environment institutions and supporting knowledge acquisition and management to identify knowledge gaps and research priorities Dr Clarke said the report therefore; recommended the setting up of a body to co-ordinate crosscutting environment and health issues that would save financial resources through harmonisation of research. The report said a linkage drawn between health and environment through research could lead to the formulation of relevant policies thereby bridging the gap between policy and research.

Under health and environmental linkage, key findings revealed that no formal connection existed between health and environment policies and that currently no effort is being made to integrate such plans. In addition; health development plans did not adequately address environmental risk because they are being addressed by different health organisations and vice versa.

On the status of health and environment strategic alliance, the report indicated that there was no formal inter-sectoral mechanism that existed to co-ordinate crosscutting health and environment issues and this called for some level of collaboration between committee levels and officials in the environment sector.

The report identified floods and erosion as the most important environmental risk factors to human health in urban and rural areas. Also 58 per cent of the population in urban areas have access to good sanitation while untreated water bodies serve as the most important source of water for most rural communities.

Urban areas in Ghana are mostly characterised by indiscriminate dumping of waste, poor industrial and medical waste management, severe air pollution from vehicular and un-tarred roads, sale of food in unhygienic settings, water rationing, poor infrastructural planning, and high incidence of malaria and direct discharge of industrial waste into marine. It said though some monitoring activities were done routinely it intended to be ad-hoc and reactionary rather than proactive, adding that most organisations lacked the financial resources to undertake regular monitoring activities.

The report also noted that no organisation exist to correlate results in environment and health while the specific factors monitored included water, biodiversity, droughts, flood as well as coastal and marine resources. Dr George Amofa, Deputy Director General of GHS said 60-70 per cent of diseases were attributed to water and sanitation and this called for situational analysis especially in the wake of climate change, industrial revolution and its affect on health. He said implementing the declaration called for political will and financial commitment to enforce regulation.