Hope for sickle cell patients (Graphic Business)

THE Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in Kumasi last week cut the sod to begin work on the construction of a GH¢13.66 million clinic for the treatment of sickle cell.
Funds for the project was a grant committed by the government of Brazil to facilitate the fight against the disease which mostly people of the black race.
When completed, the three-storey edifice, will serve as a centre for the management of sickle cell patients in the West African sub-region.
Dubbed, the Kumasi Blood and Sickle Cell Centre, the project would include a blood transfusion centre, an out-patient clinic for sickle cell patients and other blood diseases as well as serve as a research centre for related conditions.
With these facilities in place, the centre is expected to provide greater impetus to enhance quality of life of sickle cell patients through the provision of quality service care.
The agreement for the project came into being when the Brazil-Ghana Technical Co-operation Agreement on Sickle Cell Disease was signed on October 7, 2009. That was at the closing ceremony of the 5th Brazilian International Symposium on Sickle Cell Disease held in Belo Horizonte.
Under the agreement, Brazil agreed to assist Ghana to expand the national new-born screening programme, by upgrading the screening laboratory, training the technical personnel, developing the educational and training programmes in the sickle cell disease and provide supplies for the initial expansion of the national screening programme.
At the sod cutting ceremony in Kumasi, a national new-born screening programme for sickle cell and other diseases was also launched by the Minister of Health, Dr Benjamin Kunbuor, who cut the sod for the project to begin.
In addition Dr Kunbuor also inaugurated a 12-member New-born Screening Committee to draft new-born screening policy for the Ministry of Health. He charged the committee to start work immediately and submit drafts of the national new-born screening policy and the technical plan and budget for the implementation of the national screening programme by March 1, 2011.
The objective of the national new-born screening programme is to offer every baby born in Ghana screening test for sickle cell diseases to make it possible for early diagnosis of the disease before symptoms and complications develop.
This allows health workers to educate parents about the special needs of the children so as to begin preventive treatment before they develop the complications of the disease.
Many of these complications, especially bacteria and malaria infections can kill young children before parents and doctors even suspect that the victims have the disease.
Before the screening and early diagnosis and treatment, more than 90 per cent of babies born with sickle cell disease in Africa died before the age of five.
In Africa, the largest and most advanced of the pilot projects to screen new-borns was started in Kumasi-Tikrom, in 1993.
It began in 1993 to 2008, through grants awarded by the National Institute of Health to Professor Kwaku Ohene-Frempong (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, USA) and colleagues in Ghana, led by Professor Francis K. Nkrumah (Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research).
The screening project has continued under the support of the Ministry of Health, National Health Insurance Authority, (NHIA) Ghana Health Service (GHS), Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR), and the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, under the co-ordination of the Sickle Cell Foundation of Ghana.
The national scale-up of new-born screening for sickle cell disease would entail expansion of the new-born screening laboratory at Noguchi with additional equipment and supplies, the training of additional technical personnel, and enhancement of the Information Technology and Communications systems to run the programme.
Every year some 13,000 babies are born with sickle cell disease in Ghana. Many of them die without the diagnosis or treatment of the disease.
By the end of June 2010, the Kumasi-Tikrom pilot new-born screening programme had screened 308,632 babies, found 5,381 to have the disease and enrolled 3,549 of them in the Sickle Cell Clinic established at KATH.
In Africa, more than 400,000 babies are born with the inherited disease each year. It is usually passed on to children by parents who are AS or AC, healthy carriers of the genes.
About 25 per cent of Ghanaians carry genes that can lead to sickle cell. The disease has many features and complications that include anaemia, pain episodes which is refers to as crises, stroke, lung and joint damage, and overwhelming infections.