Maternal, child health campaign begins today (Women's Page 17)

Story: Lucy Adoma Yeboah
This year’s Integrated Maternal and Child Health Campaign (IMCH) will be held from October 16 to 18.
The three-day nation-wide campaign, which is being organised on the theme “Healthy Mothers and Children make a better Ghana” is aimed at creating awareness and encouraging people to take these campaigns seriously in order to reduce child mortality and morbidity, improve maternal health and reduce maternal mortality.
The National Child Health Unit of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) says about 80,000 children below the age of five, die each year from preventable diseases. That is because children at that age are most vulnerable to illnesses which easily kill them before they attain the age of five.
For this reason, the health sector has over the years embarked on series of cost effective interventions to reduce the high rate of child mortality as well as improve on maternal health in the country. Among these interventions are the introduction of the Child Health Promotion Weeks, the High Impact Rapid Delivery Approach, the Integrated Measles Campaign and the annual Integrated Maternal and Child Health Campaign (IMCH).
The GHS, in conjunction with the Ministry of Health (MOH), the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Rotary Club of Ghana, jointly launched this year’s IMCH Campaign in Accra on Tuesday, October 6, 2008, to continue with its efforts of saving mothers and their children from illnesses and subsequent death.
Addressing the ceremony which was attended by health professionals, queens, child welfare groups and other stakeholders, the National Child Health Co-ordinator of the GHS, Dr Isabella Sagoe-Moses, called on Ghanaians to take immunisation programmes seriously since they impacted positively on the lives of children.
She said children under five would be given Vitamin A supplement, immunised against tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, diphtheria, pertusis, tetanus, yellow fever, Hepatitis B and Haemophilia influenza and will also be dewormed.
As part of the campaign, children below one year in the three northern regions and the Central Region would be offered free insecticide-treated nets as a top up to what had already been distributed to children throughout the country in earlier programmes to prevent malaria.
Dr Sagoe-Moses said to boost the immune systems of babies, mothers need to breast feed their children within half an hour of delivery and continue to feed on breast milk only till they were six months old.
She advised that it was important to immunise children against childhood diseases, make them to complete all required immunisations before they were 12 months old and also take them to clinic for Vitamin A supplement when they were six months old till they were five years old. She explained that Vitamin A made children and nursing mothers stronger and healthier.
One important information she gave was the fact that children were to be given worm expellers every six months instead of the usual three months and also a child should be fed before he or she was given a dewormer.
Dr Sagoe-Moses cautioned that Ghana faced the threat of importing poliomyelitis from neighbouring African countries, and explained that the deadly childhood disease, which had not affected any Ghanaian child since September 2003, was reported to have been affecting children in Nigeria.
In another development the Upper East Directorate of the GHS, in collaboration with UNICEF and other partners, has launched the campaign with a call on parents to partner the GHS in improving the well-being of women and children, reports Benjamin Xornam Glover, Bolgatanga.
In the Upper East Region a total of 550, 123 children under-five years will receive polio vaccination, Vitamin A supplementation and de-worming treatment, while long lasting insecticide-treated nets will be provided for children less than one year.
Again a total of 40, 750 pregnant mothers will be de-wormed and given vitamin A supplementation.
Launching the campaign, the Regional Director of Health Services, Dr John Koku Awoonor-Williams, said since the launch of the campaign the country had not recorded any death resulting from measles , while measles cases dropped drastically from 34,671 in 1994 to 434 cases in 2005.
He called on all Municipal and District Assemblies, heads of households, chiefs and community opinion leaders to help mobilise their communities for a successful programme.
He commended World Vision International, the Red Cross and UNICEF which has given GH c 13,000 towards the training of Community Based Agents and providing 40,000 bed nets for distribution.