GIFTS program is golden opportunity to eradicate anemia from Ghana — GHS

The Ghana Health Service (GHS) in the Savannah Region is calling on the general public to embrace the Girls' Iron Folic Tablets Supplementation (Gifts) program as an important step to eradicating anaemia among adolescent girls in Ghana.

At a media and stakeholder engagement on Girls' Iron Folic Tablets Supplementation (GIFTS) program held at Damongo, the Savannah Regional capital, the Regional Nutrition Officer, Brian Kamara noted that anaemia remains a problem of public health in Ghana with a prevalence rate of 26% among young adults aged 15-19 years in 2017.

He said the GIFTS program was being implemented as an inter-sectorial intervention between the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) with their partners to promote health and nutrition education and enhance behaviour change to control and prevent anaemia.

According to him, due to the inadequate cross-sectorial communication and poor institutional commitment, there were a lot of misconceptions around the GIFTs program with some misconceiving the IFA Supplements as family planning pills, adding that," we need the strong partnership and support of the media to correct some of these misconceptions".

The Savannah Regional Director of the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Chrystantus Kubio, used the opportunity to dispel rumors of meningitis outbreak in the region.

He calls for a collaborative effort to address issues of anaemia among adolescent girls.

He said there was the need to incorporate health and nutrition education among adolescent girls both in school and out of school to promote healthy behaviours and eradicate misconceptions surrounding Iron Folic Acid Supplementation.

On CoVid-19, he noted that there were gaps in the vaccination as the country enter the fourth wave of the pandemic with a lot of people resisting the jab.

According to him, the service has received enough stock of the Covid-19 vaccines for the region.

He called on the media to help address the public misconceptions and hesitancy to the Covid-19 jab in order to reduce the spread of the virus.