Typhoid diseases on the rise in Jato Akura - Residents beg government for potable water

A surgeon at the Kintampo Municipal Hospital, Sarah Azindow, and residents of Jato Akura, a small farming community in the Kintampo North Municipality of the Bono East Region, are appealing to the government to provide the community with potable drinking water as typhoid cases from the community is on the rise.

Sarah Azindow, who doubles as the clinical coordinator of the hospital said the hospital records cases of typhoid diseases every single day some of which are cases of typhoid perforation that require surgeries.

She said, that over the last eight months, the hospital recorded 14 cases of typhoid perforation, 12 of which were cases from the Jato Akura community.

She disclosed this to the Jato Akura community.

Residents of Jato Akura, Tahiru Akura, Mahama Akura, Alhassan Akura, and Chiranda in the Kintampo North Municipality have been battling with water crises, especially, during dry seasons.

Residents of these communities rely on dugouts as their only source of water.

The dugouts dry up in the dry seasons causing acute water shortage while, in the rainy seasons, rain water fills them up with filth including animal and human secreta.

Some Residents, after drinking from these dugouts, develop minor typhoid diseases which sometimes develop into typhoid perforations.

In June 2023, 13-year-old Aisha Wahabu from Jato Akura was diagnosed with typhoid perforation, a condition that necessitated six different surgical operations to save her life.

Aisha was admitted to the hospital for two months before she was discharged.

The surgeon who led the surgical operations on Aisha, in an interview with this writer said the situation is becoming more worrying as the hospital begins to receive some typhoid cases from Kintampo township and other communities.

"We receive typhoid cases almost every day but there are different stages of the typhoid. There's a typhoid that's still in the blood and there's the one that has created a hole in your intestines that you will need to do surgery. For those that have created the holes that you need surgery for, from January till now, we've done 14, so that's like 2 per month"

"We had like first three in one month then we came and did education here and the cases went down; we didn't get any perforation for like three months and then it started again. So it's like the education went well for a while and then people have started forgetting and we are back to the same place. But the surprising thing is, that Kintampo township also has typhoid diseases. They are coming", she said.

While urging residents of the community to drink boiled water, she also appealed to the government to provide potable water for residents of the Jato Akura and its sister communities to save them from typhoid and other water-borne diseases
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"A state that cannot get our people portable water has failed. So the onus now falls on the government to provide the people of Jato Akura, Atta Akura, Chiranda, and Mahama Akura. Water is life, water is medicine, water is food, water is everything. It is a basic necessity. So if you can't do anything for somebody, at least, drinking water, portable drinking water, that one you should be able to provide"

"Water should have been a priority before electricity. If you have water and you don't have electricity, that's fair enough. But if you have electricity and you don't have water, that means your priorities have turned the other way round ", she added.

The Assemblyman of Chiranda electoral area, Raymond Nantia, after narrating how he lost his stepmother through typhoid perforation, also narrated the ordeal he and his people went through.

"We don't have any proper drinking water here. We are always compelled to drink from dugouts. We don't have a toilet facility here. we go a free range and whenever it rains, faeces and rubbish flow into the dugouts we drink from. The residents here are contracting typhoid diseases. My stepmother; my junior father's wife had typhoid perforation and passed on later after she was sent to the hospital. So we are appealing to the government to provide us with portable water", he remarked.

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