Dr. Titus Beyuo, the general secretary of the Ghana Medical Association, has praised the promptness and professionalism of the medical staff's response to the two instances of Marburg virus infection.
He claims that so far, their professionalism in addressing the two cases has considerably helped to stop a widespread breakout, especially among the professionals who had direct contact with the two patients.
Dr. Beyuo stated on JoyNews' PM Express: "To the extent that after the diagnosis we have not had several health workers infected also means that standard infection prevention and control measures were heeded by our clinicians and cadre of healthcare workers who had attended to these two patients and that is why we haven't had a mass outbreak among the health care industry.
The healthcare professionals' degree of readiness, he added, may also be primarily due to the preparations the nation took in the wake of the Ebola virus epidemic because the Marburg virus is closely related to the Ebola virus.
Additionally, he added, "it testifies to the fact that we have been prepared as a country because during Ebola, we put in a lot of precautions and dispatched employees to neighbouring countries to help and we never had a problem in Ghana."
He said that the Covid-19 epidemic is also significantly to blame for the health personnel' understanding of and adherence to the conventional infection prevention practises.
He said that if the guidelines had not been strengthened in the wake of the Covid-19 epidemic, the reaction to the Marburg patients would have been ineffective and resulted in a widespread outbreak in the hospital.
"Covid came, and we're still in Covid, and I think Covid has done us a lot of good in this respect since it has raised our adherence to our normal infection prevention practises and brought everyone into awareness. We may never know what may have occurred if Covid didn't exist before to this alleged pandemic since people may have acted quite carelessly.
In order to stop the spread of the disease, he stated, "clinicians are fully able to pick up the patient by case definition should any of these contacts show anyplace today or anyone else who has not been picked up appear in any clinic today."
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