EXTEND CROSS-BORDER DISEASE CONTROL TO ECOWAS (BACK PAGE)

The Director of Research and Information Management Systems of the West African Health Organisation (WAHO), Dr Kambou Stanislas, has appealed to the international donor community to extend the cross-border parasitic diseases control programme to cover all Ecowas states.
Presently the programme which covers nine countries out of the 15 Ecowas states has made the complete eradication of guinea worm, bilhazia and other parasitic diseases impossible.
Dr Stanislas made the appeal at a high-level ministerial meeting on parasite control in West Africa, which opened in Accra on Thursday.
He said the expansion of the project to cover the whole sub-region would assist a great deal to combat diseases such as malaria, bilhazia, HIV/AIDS, as well as the six childhood killer diseases.
He commended the Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA) initiative to establish the West African Centre for International Parasite Control (WACIPAC) as a regional centre to support parasite control activities in West Africa.
The Director said the West African Health Organisation under Ecowas, through operational research, had come to realise that some diseases such as bilhazia and guinea worm could easily be transferred from one country to another through travelling and trading in border towns.
He, therefore, called for a concerted approach in the sub-region to tackle the constraints posed by cross-border activities and the spread of some diseases in the sub-region.
Mr Kunihiro Yamauchi, resident representative of JICA, said parasitic diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis (bilhazia) were among the most serious health hazards of people living in the tropics, with over 500 million people suffering each year from the two diseases.
He further said that another 3.5 million people were estimated to be infected with soil transmitted intestinal parasites such as round and hook worms.
He said the huge burden parasitic diseases bring to bear on the socio-economic development and health of people in developing countries moved the Japanese Government to propose to the Birmingham G-8 summit in 1998 for an international co-operation to control parasitic diseases at the global level.
He said the Japanese Government, through JICA, had established three centres for international parasite control, with the centre in charge of West Africa based at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR) of the University of Ghana, Legon.
He, therefore, urged the participants to use their rich experiences to strategise to sustain the school-based approach when JICA finally handed over the project to member countries at the end of 2008.
Mr Yamauchi said JICA was optimistic that attitudinal change among schoolchildren could drastically help to reduce parasitic diseases in the sub-region.