Pneumonia in Ghana—a need to raise the profile

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected healthcare systems worldwide, impacting the occurrence and management of respiratory illnesses. This has also influenced respiratory infections’ role in childhood mortality. Surveillance of common respiratory viruses in Ghana is limited, making it crucial to assess the prevalence of respiratory viral infections, particularly in children, in the post-pandemic era. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of respiratory viruses and identify associated risk factors in children aged 5 or younger in an urban paediatric hospital setting. Methods The study was a cross-sectional study with a convenience sampling method, conducted in four health facilities: Asokwa Children’s Hospital, HopeXchange Medical Centre, University Health Services-KNUST, and Kumasi South Hospital in Kumasi, Ghana, between August 2022 and June 2023. Recruitment was not done in parallel in each hospital. Oropharyngeal swabs were collected from children <= 5 years old and screened by RT-qPCR for common respiratory viruses. Results Out of the 303 patients enrolled in the study, 165 (54.4%) were male, and 122 (40.3%) were aged from 13 to 36 months. The median age of the patients was 19 months. The most common symptoms reported were cough (87.0%), runny nose (87.0%), and fever (72.0%). Respiratory viruses were detected in 100 (33.0%) of the samples, with 36 (12.0%) testing positive for Human metapneumovirus (HMPV), 27 (8.9%) for RSV, and 20 (6.6%) for Human Adenovirus (HAdV). In 8.0% of the cases, multiple viruses were detected, with HAdV being the most common (75.0%). Children under 6 months (AOR: 4.81, 95% CI: 1.20-24.60) had a higher risk of RSV detection compared to children aged 37 to 60 months. Furthermore, it was found that caregivers with tertiary education had a higher risk of HMPV detection (AOR: 6.91, 95% CI: 1.71-47.3). Conclusion The study's findings emphasize the potentially significant role of HMPV in causing respiratory infections among children in Ghana. Active surveillance of common respiratory viruses in healthcare facilities could enhance the management of viral respiratory infection cases in the paediatric population in Ghana.

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Etiologic Profile of the Pneumococcus in Ghana: A Systematic Review

Arhin,

Donkor,

Slotved

et al. 2024

BioMed Research International

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Objective: To describe the profile of Streptococcus pneumoniae, identify research gaps, and provide in‐depth insights into various aspects related to the pathogen.Methods: Google Scholar, PubMed, and ScienceDirect were searched for all studies on the pneumococcus in Ghana that reported on specimen collected, population and sample size, carriage prevalence, incidence of pneumococcal diseases, age of the study population, types of test performed, serotypes identified, antimicrobial susceptibilities, or molecular analysis on the pneumococci for data extraction.Results: Overall, a total of 7954 results were obtained from the three‐database search, and of this, 24 articles were selected after screening. A total of 924 isolates were accounted for by serotyping/serogrouping. The prevalence of pneumococcal carriage in Ghana ranges from 11.0% to 51.4% in the population depending on the age (≤ 24–80 years), sickle cell disease (SCD), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status, or health of the study population, and penicillin (Pen)‐nonsusceptible isolates ranged from 17% to 63%. The prevalence of pneumococci found as the etiologic agent of diseases among Ghanaians ranges from 3.4% for otitis media to 77.7% for meningitis. Overall, the 13‐valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) (PCV‐13) carriage serotypes accounted for 28.4% of the reported pneumococcal isolates. PCV‐13 invasive serotypes accounted for 22.4% of the reported isolates. The non‐PCV‐13 carriage serotypes accounted for most (43.9%) of the reported isolates. In the pre‐PCV‐13 era, the nontypeable (NT) (5.5%) and other nonvaccine types (NVTs) (6.4%) were reported as being predominant. The non‐PCV‐13 serotypes accounted for 4.4% of the reported isolates in invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) cases. Multidrug resistance (MDR) ranged from 7.8% to 100%.Conclusion: Predicting the invasiveness of pneumococci using molecular typing is the way to go in the future as this will provide answers to the extent to which capsular switching is contributing to the pneumococcal disease burden in Ghana almost a decade after introducing PCV‐13. Continuous monitoring of antibiotic resistance patterns at both phenotypic and genotypic levels, along with serotyping and molecular typing, should be a standard practice in the surveillance of pneumococcal disease burden in Ghana.

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Pneumonia in Ghana—a need to raise the profile

Cited by 5 publications

References 14 publications

A mixed‐methods evaluation of stakeholder perspectives on pediatric pneumonia in Nigeria—priorities, challenges, and champions

A mixed‐methods evaluation of stakeholder perspectives on pediatric pneumonia in Nigeria—priorities, challenges, and champions

Prevalence of Common Respiratory Viruses in Children: Insights from Post-Pandemic Surveillance

Etiologic Profile of the Pneumococcus in Ghana: A Systematic Review

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