Atik Mohammed has slammed the Akufo-Addo government over their seemingly slow response to solving the outbreak of Cerebrospinal Meningitis and H1N1 virus across the country.
Speaking on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo', Atik Mohammed stated emphatically that the current administration's "insensitive" posture on the issue is problematic.
His explanation is that President Akufo-Addo and his government are fully aware of the causes, symptoms and dangers of the disease but would wait for it to strike and they react to it.
He called on the government to be proactive and adopt the right measures to prevent the outbreak.
Atik Mohammed told host Kwami Sefa Kayi that there are vaccinations to prevent the outbreak and so wondered why school children in the country are not being vaccinated since the diseases pervaded the schools.
He asked the President to declare a "state of emergency" and deploy health practitioners to all secondary schools to vaccinate them against any further outbreak and also prevent a future recurrence.
To him, if the affected students or the deceased were to be a relative or child of the government officials; they would have dealt with the situation with much urgency.
“Is it because those children are not your children? It’s a problem that it appears this administration is not too serious about. And our children are dying. Our brothers and sisters are dying . . . We should send public health nurses to the secondary schools and vaccinate them,” he said.
He advised the current administration to begin a vaccination exercise if they so value the lives of the school children.
“There are vaccinations to stop it or prevent it. What is stopping this administration from making sure that every secondary school, it doesn’t matter the location of the secondary school; the public health nurses will go there to vaccinate the school children so that we would stop these rather unfortunate deaths we’re recording. I can’t just understand it. It shows that there is some sense of insensitivity . . .
“ . . let us begin to be proactive and stop coming to explain the causes of deaths. We need to stop the deaths before they even occur,” he said.