Focus Your Reportage On WASH Neglected Tropical Diseases-Ibrahim Musah Urges Media Practitioners
A seasoned Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) policy specialist who doubles as the Technical Lead for National Coordinator of Ghana Wash Journalists Network (GWJN), Mr. Ibrahim Musah, has underscored the need for the media practitioners to write a compelling change stories on WASH Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs).
Freeman Koryekpor Awlesu Greater 
A seasoned Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) policy specialist who doubles as the Technical Lead for National Coordinator of Ghana Wash Journalists Network (GWJN), Mr. Ibrahim Musah, has underscored the need for the media practitioners to write a compelling change stories on WASH Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs).
According to Mr Musah, he observed with grace concern that a huge numbers of the neglected tropical diseases, such as dengue, lymphatic filariasis, trachoma and the leishmaniasis that affects human beings are left out in the reportage of media practitioners in the country.
WASH neglected tropical diseases, Mr Musah noted are health areas that the journalists donot report on, saying that it is the time for the media practitioners to seriously focus their reportage on the WASH neglected tropical diseases in order to accelerate and sustain progress on neglected tropical diseases.
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The WASH specialist maintained that some of the WASH neglected tropical diseases are also water, sanitation and hygiene related and that it comes mostly when there are no water or decent sanitation facilities in the communities.
He spoke intensively about the water, sanitation and hygiene challenges facing the various healthcare providing facilities, saying that when the health facilities do not have easy access to water and soap to wash their hands or instruments after the treatment of the patients of neglected tropical diseases, they can mistakenly use same health instruments to treat another patients who attend the facilities.
"For instance if you have been to the hospital and that after the doctors using seasors, knifes and turned way to open his/her pipe and it happens that the water is not flowing so how is he or her going to wash instruments that he or she has used to work on patients.
"So because when you realized the doctor has left that instruments there and the next patients come to same hospital then he or she may picks same instruments to treat the another patient because of lack of access to water. So the question to ask is that do you go to the hospital to be retreated or to be infected with disease.So lack of access to water, sanitation and hygiene are some of the challenges hospital facilities are bringing to us," he noted.
Mr Musah made these statements when he was making a power point presentation at the national delegates conference being organized by GWJN in Dodowa Forest Hotel in the Greater Accra on Thursday August 25, 2022.
In his power presentation, Mr Musah took the members of GWJN through the role of media in Ghana's WASH Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda.
The training workshop is being financed through the first Roddenberry Foundation’s +1 Global Fund grant to GWJN.
Themed; "Building A Strong Media Coalition for Effective WASH Advocacy," the event brought together over 25 journalists from the Western, Eastern, Ashanti Region, Volta, Upper East and Bono Regions.
Generally, the delegates further discussed how to strengthen the regional networks, and then specific assignments are agreed upon for the regional coordinators.
The Neglected tropical diseases are a diverse group of 20 conditions that are mainly prevalent in tropical areas, where they mostly affect more than 1 billion people who live mostly impoverished communities.
They are caused by a variety of pathogens including viruses, bacteria, parasites, fungi and toxins
