NHRC to introduce drugs for Sickle Cell in children
Dr Patrick Ansah, the Head of Clinical Science Department at the Navrongo Health Research Centre (NHRC) in the Kassena-Nankana Municipality of the Upper East Region says the Centre is involved in studies on Sickle Cell Disease and would soon introduce drugs for management of Sickle Cell crises in children.
Sickle Cell Disease is a group of inherited Red Blood Cells (RBC) disorders, which causes a misshape or sickle-shape of the RBCs, which could stick to the blood vessel walls and cause blockage that slows or stops the flow of blood.
This prevents oxygen from reaching tissues in the body, which causes sudden severe pain in victims without any warning signs.
Dr Ansah said the current drug for management of the Sickle Cell crises was developed to manage stroke patients, and explained that “When you look at stroke patients and Sickle Cell crises, they have basically the same strategies.”
He was speaking to Journalists in an interview on the sideline of a two-day Annual General and Scientific review meeting of the NHRC in Navrongo, and said the drug was under development for purposes of reducing pain crises in Sickle Cell patients.
The programme, which afforded professionals of the Centre to review their activities in 2019, was on the theme, “Shaping health policies in Ghana through quality health research; the story of NHRC, three decades on.”
On his part, Dr Abraham Oduro, the Director of the NHRC said power fluctuation was one of the major challenges the Centre faced in the year under review, which compelled management to spend large sums of money to purchase automatic voltage regulators and an electricity transformer.
He said the Centre used fragile equipment such as chemistry and haematology analyzers, vaccine refrigerators, computers among others, and the power fluctuations experienced last year affected their machines.
When the Ghana News Agency suggested to the Director to invite Journalists to take part in the Centre’s research work to enable them inform members of the public appropriately, Dr Oduro conceded that the situation, where Journalists were only invited to report findings of research work was not proper.
He said management would consider a review of the system so that some selected Journalists could be taken on board during research work.
This, he said would help Journalists to understand the various researches the Centre undertook, and project their activities to members of the public and further reduce the misinformation sometimes churned out by some of them.
“It will project, what we do because many people do not know exactly what we do and it sometimes creates problems with some questioning why Doctors are into research.”
Source: GNA