The Director-General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, has denied claims that the country has recorded an outbreak of Ebola Virus.
According to him what was reported as an outbreak was a simulation exercise organised to test the preparedness of health personnel in an unlikely outbreak that was misconstrued by some journalists as an outbreak.
“We don’t have any Ebola. Like I said we always do some simulation exercise. We don’t wait for an outbreak before preparing but we always prepare in readiness so that in the unlikely event that we have any disease outbreak we can contain it. It is one of these simulation exercises that was taking place in Tamale that was misconstrued by someone and reported it as an outbreak,” he emphasised.
Dr Kuma-Aboagye disclosed at the Wednesday edition of the Minister’s Briefing in Accra yesterday.
Yesterday there was a widely circulated news report that, the country had recorded one case of Ebola at Tamale in the Northern Region.
However, DrKuma-Aboagye said the report was false and should be disregarded.
Providing an update on the COVID-19 pandemic, he said the country was witnessing a new surge in the number of outbreaks.
He said the worrying aspect of the new upsurge was the number of cases being recorded among persons below the ages of 15years.
Dr Kuma-Aboagye explained that workplace and school outbreaks continued to be the main driver of the upsurge.
He said four new COVID-19 related deaths had been recorded over the last two weeks with the number of active cases still going up.
The Director-General noted that it was important for Ghanaians to return adhering to the existing COVID-19 protocol in order to avert the surge from spiralling out of control.
He explained that the Greater Accra and the Ashanti regions continued to be the areas where more cases were being seen.
He said so far 15 out of the 16 regions currently had active cases with the Greater Accra accounting for 78 per cent of the cases.
However, he said the number of active cases in the Ashanti Region were confined to only eight districts albeit mild cases.
Touching on the monkeypox disease, he said 72 suspected cases had been recorded as of June 17 out of which 18 representing 25per cent were found to be positive.
The cases he said were found in the Greater Accra, Eastern, Ashanti and the Bono regions.
BY CLIFF EKUFUL
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