WHO increases priority diseases for surveillance

Accra, Aug. 11, GNA- The World Health Organisation (WHO), has increased Ghana's priority diseases surveillance to ensure their eradication from 23 to 44 to include other emerging and re-emerging diseases.

The emerging and re-emerging diseases include severe acute respiratory syndrome, avian and pandemic influenza, lishmaniasis, pertussis, cikungunya fever, non-communicable diseases, hypertension, diabetes mellitus and asthma.

Dr Lawson Ahadzie, head of the Disease and Surveillance Unit of the Ghana Health Service, said this at the opening of a two-day meeting of the Unit to revise Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) Technical Guidelines.

The guidelines under review were prepared in 2002 and have been used since then working with the 23 priority diseases selected for surveillance.

He noted that most surveillance systems did not include pneumonia and diarrhoea, which were the first two causes of childhood deaths. Dr Ahadzie said "integration" had not fully covered all the priority diseases and there were inadequate resources coupled with the emergence of new diseases.

He said the collection, analysis, utilization and dissemination of data at all levels was inadequate and called for evaluation of programmes using surveillance data to avoid duplication of efforts to control and fight epidemic prone diseases.

Dr Ahadzie said with adequate surveillance data, there would be improved prediction, early detection and control of epidemics, enhanced quality of planning, rational allocation of resources and improvement in monitoring and evaluation as well as feedback. The IDSR Strategy, which was proposed by the Africa Regional Office of WHO to strengthen communicable disease surveillance using an integrated approach, was adopted by Ghana in 1998. The approach is aimed at co-ordinating and streamlining all surveillance activities and ensuring timely provision of surveillance data to all disease control programmes.

Disease surveillance is the ongoing systematic and regular collection, collation, analysis and interpretation of data on the occurrence, distribution and trends of a disease with sufficient accuracy and completeness and the dissemination of information to those who need to know to take action on disease control. Dr Evelyn Ansah, Deputy Director of District Health Services, Dangme West, called for all hands to be on deck for the adoption of the guidelines.