More accuracy needed in information available on websites

Aug 01, 2008 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
In SN 2008-07-30, the Minister of Health was reported as taking exception to statistics published in the UNAIDS Report, specifically the prevalence rate of the disease and the coverage of the country’s PMTCT programme.

He hoped, according to the author of the article, that next time they (the UN) would use more up-to-date figures.

Perhaps the Minister might like to establish the practice of annual reporting of such statistics and others in an official document?

In that way the press, and by extension the public, would not have to depend on a distant, alien and dated text for the state of health care in our own country.

After all we do have vested interest in our welfare, don’t we? I would even go so far as to suggest that the culture of accountability and transparency in cooperation with the media would create a difference at the grass-roots level where in fact health issues are dealt with moment by moment.

In visiting the Ministry’s attractive website, I found the latest bulletin as being for the year 2005! So much for the use of up-to-date figures. Further a cursory glance at the many tables revealed something I never knew.

On page 23, illustrating the “ten most prevalent diseases among males and females countrywide” is a pair of bars for accidents and injuries. Are Accidents and Injuries diseases now?

Then there is the nebulous “Signs, Symptoms and Abnormal Clinical Findings” amounting to about a quarter of all cases reported. If I have erred, forgive me. It was only a quick visit to see what was “most currently and readily” available.

If there is better, then that would be the fault first of the author of the document and then of the web designer whose role I believe was lightly addressed by Leon Suseran in an earlier correspondence, aptly titled Websites are like Grave Sites in Kaieteur News, 2008-07-29.

There is much to say about that and the state of ICT in general in the country, but I would at another time.
Mark A.C. Blair