While attending the meeting held at Kibuli Senior Secondary School, Dr. Hellen Aanyu, a Pediatrician at Mulago National Referral Hospital said many undiagnosed children miss school unnecessarily because of failure to diagnose them early so that they are enrolled in treatment.
Makerere University Lung Institute (MLI) has initiated school visits to educate and assess children and adolescents living with asthma. The program aims to raise awareness about how asthma manifests and to guide first aid measures to take during an asthma attack.
This comes
after scientists at the Institute conducted a study that found two in every
ten children aged 12 and 15 to have symptoms of the disease that often present with breathing difficulties, cough, and wheezing among others. This study was
done among 895 students attending secondary school in Kampala, Wakiso, and
Mukono districts.
While attending
the meeting held at Kibuli Senior Secondary School, Dr. Hellen Aanyu, a
Pediatrician at Mulago National Referral Hospital said many undiagnosed children miss school unnecessarily because of failure to diagnose them
early so that they are enrolled in treatment.
Just at this
event, the doctor revealed that they had found a 16-year-old who had never been
diagnosed but had been down with asthma for two weeks. Aanyu further reveals that
they established that some children with asthma are not on treatment since their caretakers live in denial yet some fear that their children will
get addicted to treatment once they start using inhalers, something that she
says is a false but common myth.
//Cue in:”
We have conducted …
Cue out: … addicted
to them,”//
According to
Dr. Rebecca Nantanda, another pediatrician based at Makerere University Lung
Institute, there is currently very limited information on treatment and symptom
control among these children. Acknowledging the challenges of awareness,
Nantanda says the perceptions about asthma and the opportunities and barriers
to symptom control are not known even as this is referred to as a disease of
urbanization.
Speaking on
the sidelines of the awareness event, Musa Nyango a biology teacher at Kibuli
Senior Secondary School said because there is no awareness in the community,
they often get sick students at the beginning of senior one and senior five who
have never known to be living with the disease.
//Cue in:”
Every year we ….
Cue out: … but
we help”. //
The teacher
says such awareness campaigns are not just helpful with rooting out those living
with the disease, but also give the school nurses, students and sufferers hints on
how to handle such cases since, apart
from treatment, there are a lot of lifestyle changes that can help a sufferer
to live a normal life are recommended when someone is diagnosed.
Meanwhile, however,
recent surveys have found that on the African continent, the number of school
children with asthma has increased by over 15 million since 1990. In Uganda, while there are no specific figures for school-going children, the general prevalence of asthma is on the increase as Ministry of Health data shows they record over 100,000 new cases each year.