Health in Ghana - Disease

Disease

According to the World Health Organization the most common diseases in Ghana include those endemic to sub-Saharan African countries, particularly: cholera, typhoid, pulmonary tuberculosis, anthrax, pertussis, tetanus, chicken pox, yellow fever, measles, infectious hepatitis, trachoma, malaria, and schistosomiasis. Though not as common, other regularly treated diseases include dracunculiasis, dysentery, river blindness or onchocerciasis, several kinds of pneumonia, dehydration, venereal diseases, and poliomyelitis.

In 1994, the WHO reported malaria and measles as the most common causes of premature death. In children under 5, 70 percent of deaths were caused by an infection compounded by malnutrition. A 2011 report by the Ghana Health Service said that malaria was the primary cause of morbidity and about 32.5 percent of people admitted to Ghanaian medical facilities were admitted because of malaria.

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Famous quotes containing the word disease:

    Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad.
    I will not trouble thee, my child; farewell:
    We’ll no more meet, no more see one another.
    But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter—
    Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,
    Which I must needs call mine.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.
    Alice Miller (20th century)