Medical doctor calls for appropriate surveillance data

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Dr Lawson Ahadzie, Head of Disease and Surveillance Unit of the Ghana Health Service has called for evaluation of programmes using surveillance data to avoid duplication of efforts to control and fight epidemic prone diseases.

He 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.

Speaking at the opening of a two-day meeting of the Unit to revise Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) Technical Guidelines, Dr Ahadzie noted that the collection, analysis, utilization and dissemination of data at all levels were inadequate

He noted that most surveillance systems did not include pneumonia and diarrhoea, which were the first two causes of childhood deaths adding that in Africa, surveillance of malaria was also inadequate and needed to be revised to include them and other emerging communicable and non-communicable diseases.

The guidelines under review were prepared in 2002 and had been used for the past six years working with the 23 priority diseases selected for surveillance.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has increased this number to 44 to include other emerging diseases.

The IDSR Strategy 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 Ahadzie noted that apart from having problems with data quality, response to disease outbreak has been optimal, "integration" has not fully covered all the priority diseases and there are inadequate resources coupled with the emergence of new diseases.

The revised guidelines will reflect emerging and re-emerging communicable diseases like severe acute respiratory syndrome, avian and pandemic ifluenza, lishmaniasis, prtussis, cikungunya fever, non-communicable diseases, hypertension, diabetes mellitus and asthma.

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.

Source: GNA