Mental Health Service in Ghana: a Review of the Case

Mental health care in Ghana has been fraught with several challenges leading to stagnant growth in mental health service delivery and in some cases a severe depreciation in the nature of care. The Government of Ghana pays little or no attention to mental health care in the country, a situation that has led to poor service delivery in the three major psychiatric hospitals in Ghana. The implementation of the Ghana Mental Act of 2012 has also been faced with major challenges with no significant progress being made. This studytherefore sought to review and document the development of mental health care services in Ghana. Specifically, the study examined the various legislations on mental health that have been enacted in Ghana since 1900; investigated the implementation of the current Mental Health Act of Ghana; found out whether the Ghanaian government has prioritise mental health services in the country and assessed the challenges and problems that confronted mental health services in Ghana since 1900.The study concludes that, since 1888 efforts have been made by various governments to legislate the provision of mental services in Ghana. However, these legislations have not always protected the rights and interest of the mentally ill

Ebola Haemorrhagic Fever in Africa: a Necessary Highlight

The purpose of this commentary is to re-evaluate the historic and scientific facts on Ebola haemorrhagic fever and the role of the International community, especially Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in stemming the tide. It rehashes the argument on causes and prevention and draws attention of readers to emphasize the need for establishment of airport, sea port and border health posts with well drilled and efficient health professionals to be able to test, detect and quarantine persons with Ebola and treat them to prevent the spread of the disease from infected persons to primary or first contacts and secondary contacts. Significantly, countries in the West African sub-region are alarmed by the potential spread of the disease to countries that have hitherto been free of the disease. The potential global threat of the disease has been analysed and measures to be taken by countries within the West-African sub-region have been emphasized. This notwithstanding, does the declaration of countries as Ebola-free suggest the last of it

Heartbeat design for energy-aware IoT:are your sensors alive?

A number of algorithms now exist for using model-based prediction at the sensor node of a wireless sensor network (WSN) to enable a dramatic reduction in transmission rates, and thus save energy at the sensor node. These approaches, however, sometimes reduce the rate so substantially as to make the health state of the network opaque. One solution is to include a regular heartbeat transmission whose receipt or otherwise informs the sink about the health state of the node. However, given that a large period increases the probability that dead nodes go unnoticed at the sink, while a small period likely increases the energy cost of communication, what should be the period of the heartbeat transmission? In this paper, we examine the use of heartbeats in WSN design. We derive a general protocol for optimal and dynamic heartbeat transmission by minimising the Bayes risk, which is the expected cost of missing data from dead nodes plus the energy cost of heartbeat transmissions. Our proposed algorithm is dynamic in the sense that the heartbeat period is updated as time goes on and node failures become more probable. We validate our design experimentally using three real-world datasets, and show a 36% reduction in the total heartbeat operational cost over a heartbeat transmission with a fixed period; the results also highlight the superiority of our algorithm over arbitrarily chosen heartbeat periods in different WSN settings, thus promising significant cost savings in WSN applications.</p