Engineers are generally confronted with challenges within the subject of medication. In Ghana within the Nineteen Seventies, the Kwame Nkrumah College of Science and Expertise (KNUST), Kumasi, was referred to as upon to restore the big air-conditioning vegetation serving the surgical models of each the Korle Bu Hospital in Accra and Komfo Anokye Hospital in Kumasi. Via this programme of labor extending over a interval of two years, the director of KNUST’s Expertise Consultancy Centre (TCC) grew to become acquainted with Ghana’s two best medical centres and was capable of help them in varied different methods with the restore of imported machines and the provision of domestically made gear. A decade later, rumours circulated of the AIDS scourge sweeping by international locations in East and Central Africa, however the TCC director didn’t anticipate that his work would carry him into contact with one of many earliest makes an attempt to stem the circulate of AIDS into Ghana.
The scene was a video movie studio in Accra within the Autumn of 1987. The proprietor of the studio and TCC director have been placing the ending touches to the enhancing of a video movie: The Secret of Wealth, on the grassroots industrial improvement programme of the TCC. The studio door opened and a stocky bald-headed man with spectacles got here in. He was greeted with shock by the proprietor who requested if the professor needed to see the outcomes of their current filming. Then turning to the director the proprietor mentioned that what they have been about to evaluation may be of curiosity and the director was invited to stay.
The professor was from the Medical College of the College of Ghana, Legon, and Korle Bu Educating Hospital. With a crew of assistants he was treating AIDS sufferers at a location close to Koforidua within the Japanese Area. As a necessary software of their analysis, video filming was undertaken at common intervals and the professor had referred to as in to see the outcomes of current filming. The proprietor started to run the movie, not on the small display of the enhancing suite however projected life-size on the naked white wall of the studio.
What adopted have been scenes of horror, as skeletal figures mendacity on beds of bamboo and straw have been tended by earnest docs in white coats as they light away week-by-week till one-by-one they dropped out of the sequence. At first it appeared that the entire sufferers have been ladies they usually had all returned to Ghana from Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire the place that they had been employed as prostitutes. On enquiry, the professor defined that the ladies have been from the Krobo tribe which historically despatched its younger ladies to hunt their fortune within the former French colony. Hopefully, this coverage would now be below evaluation.
On the finish of the screening, virtually with out remark, the professor took his depart. The proprietor then defined {that a} man had additionally fallen sufferer to the illness, the primary to be recorded by the mission. Requested if any of the sufferers had recovered, he answered only one. It was suspected that this lady had not had AIDS however malnutrition, and the extremely nutritious eating regimen routinely given to the sufferers had restored her well being.
In keeping with a report printed in September 2010 by america Company for Worldwide Improvement (USAID), the primary case of HIV was detected in Ghana in 1986 and so the story advised above occurred early within the outbreak. HIV/AIDS elevated slowly in Ghana till 2003 when it peaked at 3.1% of the inhabitants earlier than falling to 1.9% by 2007. The state of affairs is at the moment mentioned to be steady however varies throughout the areas. The Northern Area is lowest at 1.2% and the Japanese Area stays the best at 4.7%. The legacy of the pioneers captured on movie in 1987 lives on a era later. One can solely hope that the expertise gained by the professor and his crew helped to organize the way in which for the superior remedies and public training programmes which have introduced in regards to the stabilised state of affairs within the twenty-first century.