Yes! I fear the outbreak of an epidemic even before the floods find their way through homes, workplaces, under bridges and over roads and rails till they unleash their accumulated shingles into the sea.
Take a look around your environment, the streets, market places and worse of all the huge undeveloped drains! It looks worse than scary to me. The Ghana Meteorological Agency warns or terrible conditions ahead and that scare me to the hilt!
It is totally unacceptable at this moment of grief for anyone to politicize the havoc that the rains and the floods have visited on many citizens within and outside the capital whereas we should be thinking through the next stage of managing this disaster, the worst in many years.
We are paying heavily for the systemic failure on the side of planning, supervision and the respect for our laws as regards building on ramsar sites and on unapproved designations.
We are also paying a huge prize for the indiscipline on the part of many of property owners and contractors acquire, develop and build all manner of structures anywhere and anyhow without any recourse to considerations of the nature of the land, topography, soil structure, architectural design, environmental threats among others.
While the Ghana Navy and the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) is battling with providing bedspreads, tents, food and clothing to many displaced persons, the worst might hit us unannounced, in the event of a possible epidemic outbreak especially in the unplanned and haphazardly laid out areas of Ashaiman, Nima, Agbogbloshie,and Aladjo.
An observation I have made around the capital is that garbage is consistently amassing on may streets and market places, probably due to the inability of the refuse collection trucks to collect the garbage for disposal at the land filled sites as many of the roads linking the sites have either been flooded or completely rendered unmotorable.
The quantum of the garbage would surely multiply in coming days if the rains do not cease falling and the floods cease swelling any time soon.
This is bad news for us especially to those living in flood-prone areas. The garbage is likely to be washed into the drains and the gutters by the rains and carried across long distances and dumped in unknown areas thus worsening the already hydra-headed sanitation problems.
Worst still would be the possibility of some unrecovered and decomposing bodies, trapped under some bridges and drains, somewhere along the channel of the flood. The mess, the stench, the decomposing and fermentation of the garbage all put together coupled with destruction of many Kumasi Ventilated Improved Pit latrines (KVIPs) and the flooding of septic tanks (man holes) would break forth a cholera epidemic that would demand millions of Ghana cedis to deal with.
Already we have a growing factor of the H1N1 outbreak on our hands and any outbreak of cholera in the ensuing weeks would either stretch our health facilities or collapse them altogether.
Dr. Benjamin Kumbour, Minister of Health together with the Parliamentary Select Committee on Health, must get themselves ready to deal with this angle of the flood as attention seem to be more focused on the politics of the rains and the distribution of relief and the mourning of the dead in some homes and communities.
This is not the time to haggle over which house should be demolished or what member of Parliament is frustrating the work of a District Assembly but we must shift gear into making immediate arrangements to protect the larger public against any health hazard the floods and the terrible excesses it is likely to pose to the wider public health.
I fear for the market women in and around the Pedestrian Shopping Mall at Odawna near the Kwame Nkrumah Circle, as the entire environment stinks and the mess could be worsened by the fury of the floods.
The Ministry of Information and Health must commence an intensive education campaign (just as they are doing with the H1N1 virus) to immediately sensitize citizens on the likely health threats that the floods are likely to pose as many man-holes, bucket latrines, KVIPs and refuse dumps have either been washed away or completely dissolved in the rushing waters of the flood.
Let us move into action, for the clock ticks onto a looming catastrophe!
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