Severe complications resulting from untreated minor disease

As expected in a place with few dentists and one physician per 27,000 inhabitants, our patients present late with severe complications from tooth infections resulting in airway obstruction, neck abscesses and septicemia. Other diseases which progress to severe complications due to the lack of health personnel are: 1) Nasal polyps resulting in sinusitis, brain and forehead abscesses, 2) Laryngeal, sinus and parotid tumors which are no longer curable and 3) Untreated congenital cleft lips, palates and cysts. Our acute cases are trauma from road traffic accidents, falls from trees, and foreign bodies in the lungs and esophagus.

The necessity of drug regulation was evident by a boy with a sore throat who took a local medicine and began bleeding from several sites, resulting in his death.

There are only two headlights for eight examiners. We ordered six portable camping headlights hopefully to be brought over today by a visiting otolaryngologist. There are an additional four headlights in a container which should arrive in two months.



Untreated tooth infection which spread to the neck.



Untreated nasal polyp which lead to sinusitis and brain abscess.

Recently, we heard an excellent lecture on macular degeneration by Professor Chapman, a visitor from the University of Louisville. Macular degeneration, which usually develops later in life and responds to vitamins, is not common in Ghana because the life expectancy here is 56 years.

What one man can do, the birthing hole

Eighteen kilometres north of Tamale, the farmers earn 50 cents a day. Here there has traditionally been a high infant and maternal mortality rate until a young physician introduced a local custom into the hospital. He noticed the pregnant mothers were not attending the prenatal clinic nor choosing to deliver in the hospital. He also learned that there was an unpleasant nurse who was working there. The nurse was eventually fired, but still the pregnant mothers did not come. When the physician visited their homes, he discovered that the women deliver while squatting over a “birthing hole” in the floor. The birthing hole is the size of a basketball, flush with the floor. He then decided to place birthing holes in the hospital delivery room and the woman now come, resulting in a great reduction in maternal and infant mortality.


He also eliminated their custom of dealing with malnourished children who were thought to be punishments from God. The mother would steal away to the forest with the malnourished infant in a shawl on her back, run and loosen the shawl, allowing the baby to fall to the ground. The woman would then return running to the village, not looking back for she believed if she did so, her next child would also be malnourished. A malnutrition center was built to care for these children and it was made to resemble the village’s own compounds. The women were amazed at the resulting weight gain and improved health of the malnourished children. They have come to understand that help is available and now bring their malnourished infants into the malnutrition center, no longer leaving them to die in the forest.