Accra, Feb. 11, GNA - A team of health experts from the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR), has been deployed to test samples of food, vomit and stool of victims of suspected food poisoning at Archbishop Porter Girls Senior High School.

Dr Elias Sory, Director General of Ghana Health Service (GHS), said the team was expected to submit its report to ascertain the cause of the food poisoning that caused a near fatal incident at the school situated at Ketan near Takoradi in the Western Region on Wednesday.

He disclosed this to the Ghana News Agency at the opening session of the first Africa-Brazil Research Collaboration meeting, organized by the World Health Organisation and the Institute in Accra on Thursday. Scores of students of the school were on Wednesday reportedly rushed to a nearby hospital while medical doctors on suspicion of food poisoning attended to others on campus. Dr Sory said that the upsurge of infectious diseases coupled with new emerging ones were a burden to both the logistics and human resource capacity of the health delivery system in the country. He called for more funding for medical research in the area of infectious diseases to clamp down on the negative impact of the disease on the socio-economic development in the country. Dr Sory called for more training of research scientist and funding to improve the health delivery system in the country and to retain these researchers to enable them to contribute to national development. He said African governments have agreed, at a forum, to commit five per cent of their current budget to fund research and stressed that Ghana must be committed towards the pledge.

"A scientist without funding to perform his work is a dead one," Dr Sory said, adding that more funding into medical research was needed to retain scientists in the country and support the GHS and other medical institutes.

Speaking on the Africa-Brazil collaboration, Dr Sory said the objective of the meeting was to create a platform to discuss and develop a framework for collaboration between researchers and research institutions in order to explore approaches to facilitate the application of research results for the control of infectious diseases. Professor Alexander Nyarko, Director of NMIMR, expressed the hope that the collaboration would enhance 'cross-fertilization of ideas', strengthen research institutions and to review existing resources available for research and to explore approaches for increasing and facilitating effective utilization of research. 11 Feb. 10