Tema-Ghana, June 11, CDA Consult – Dr. Amma Benin, a paediatrician at the International Maritime Hospital (IMaH) Tema, has stated that keeping infants in rooms for eight days before bringing them outside can prevent the identification of neonatal jaundice.
On the weekly health advocacy forum “Your Health! Our Collective Responsibility,” which aims to explore the dimensions of the four approaches to health communication, Dr. Benin addressed the subject of “Cultural practises that affect child health” in his presentation.
According to her, jaundice in infants frequently develops within the first eight days of birth, which is also consistent with the conventional wisdom that infants should be kept indoors for the first eight days following birth for spiritual reasons.
She claimed that as a result of the practise, parents struggle to spot the baby’s early jaundice symptoms, which include the child’s eyes and skin turning yellow.
The poor lighting in the rooms, she continued, made it difficult to spot the condition early, endangering the child’s life because it may result in malformations or even death. She emphasised the importance of reporting to the hospital right away if the condition is discovered.
According to Dr. Benin, between 60 and 80 percent of all newborns will have jaundice as part of the natural transition from the womb to the outside world.
She claimed that while a baby is still in the womb, the mother’s body aids in the removal of high amounts of haemoglobin; however, once the infant is born, their bodies are the only ones capable of doing this.
She claims that when red blood cells rupture, the body releases a yellow material called bilirubin, which the liver is responsible for eliminating. However, some of the babies’ bodies were unable to eliminate the extra bilirubin, which resulted in jaundice.
The Regional Manager of Ghana News Agency in Tema, Mr. Francis Ameyibor, emphasised the importance of documenting our cultural practises in order to advance society.
According to him, “our society is losing some of the powerful and vital cultural practises from generation to generation due to a lack of documentation… “As one generation relates to the next, some element in the narrative is abridged.”
Most cultural practises and traditional norms may not be harmful or incorrect, according to Mr. Ameyibor, but the generational gap in the transmission of traditional knowledge from our ancestors to the current generation has created “the lost traditional knowledge transfer gap,” which has led to the falsification of important facts.
The GNA Tema Regional Manager stated that in order to function in the contemporary environment, “we need to understand traditional processes, why certain things were done in a specific way, what are the factors within which to operate, and many other things.
