Accra, Aug. 14, GNA – Mr Kwaku Agyemang Manu, Minister of Health, has endorsed the draft National Policy for Aflatoxin Control in Food and Feed, saying it will help Ghana achieve food safety.
He said the draft policy when finalized, would go a long way to help in the country’s scientific efforts to reduce food borne diseases.
“It is good for trade, good for health and it is good for science as well,” Mr Agyeman-Manu said on Friday in Accra.
He was speaking at a meeting with a team of the National Steering Committee for Aflatoxin Control (NSCAC), led by Dr Wilhelmina Quaye, Director, Science and Technology Policy Research Institute, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, (CSIR-STEPRI), who visited the Ministry to present the draft policy, and to solicit endorsement for it to be accepted as a national document to control aflatoxin.
The Policy, developed by the National Steering Committee for Aflatoxin Control (NSCAC), and other collaborators, came with a comprehensive action plan, expected to improve the harmonisation and coordination of activities among all stakeholders for effective management and control of aflatoxins in food and feed.
The Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) provided funding to the CSIR-STEPRI to design the Aflatoxin policy for Ghana.
Four Sector Ministries, namely, Food and Agriculture, Health, Trade and Industry as well as Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation had been identified as lead entities that would be implementing the policy when finally adopted.
The Health Minister said the Food Safety policy was at Cabinet level and being discussed for passage, therefore, the Aflatoxin policy would be given the needed attention.
“I believe I cannot run away from such an important scientific issue. We are getting a lot of diseases like kidney malfunction and cancers coming up in recent times and we don’t seem to know what the causal factors are.
“We have lived and died of several diseases we never were able to diagnose until quite recently with science and technology and research,”
Mr Agyeman-Manu stated.
Dr Martha Gyansa-Lutterodt, Director, Technical Coordination, MoH, said aflatoxin was “a class one Caconogic, meaning, it was cancer forming and it affected the human liver, which put more pressure on the health sector in managing such cancers.
“We are also aware that liver cancer in the country is the commonest among males, which is about 21.1 per cent of all cancers in Ghana. And the economic burden is also huge, the reason being that key areas like our trade imports are affected- grains are rejected because Ghana does not have the capacity to test the grains that are coming to us,” Dr Ghansa-Lutterdrot said.
“And so this particular programme gives us the opportunity to improve our system and to ensure that we have value for money”.
She said the collaboration of the four sector ministries, would therefore, enhance sector-wide partnerships to ensure that policy was well executed and achieved.
Dr Mrs. Rose Omari, Senior Research Scientist, (CSIR-STEPRI), explained that aflatoxin was a food safety problem, which had become a big public health concern globally.
She said aflatoxins were among some of the contaminants found in the form of moulds on crops.
Available statistics indicate that in Africa, there are about 31 different kinds of food hazards that cause about 91 million food borne illnesses, and leading to about 140,000 deaths, Dr Omari stated.
She explained that Aflatoxins, were also part of food borne diseases, whose burden was equivalent to that of HIV and AIDS, TB and Malaria, “And so it means that we should also give aflatoxin the same attention as we do to Malaria and the others”.
Aflatoxin contamination is said to be highly prevalent in Ghana and mostly affects staple foods such as raw and processed maize products, groundnuts, sorghum, millet, kokonte (Partially fermented cassava), some species, as well as animal products such as meat, milk, fish and eggs.
Aflatoxins could cause weight loss, suppression of the immune system, various health conditions, and death in livestock and cultured fish while poultry birds fed with aflatoxin-contaminated feed often laid 70 per cent fewer eggs.
GNA