A 27-year losing battle for recognition
Friday, July 28, 2017
While the role of traditional health practitioners is well-recognised and appreciated in many progressive countries, including China and Japan, locally dingaka have spent their lives on the terraces, trodden underfoot by modern medicine.
Many traditional health practitioners (called dingaka in the vernecular) had hoped a landmark World Health Organisation (WHO) report highlighting the importance of incorporating traditional expertise and medicine into the fight against HIV/AIDS, would change paradigms among health authorities. The WHO report entitled Prospects for Involving Traditional Health Practitioners was produced in July 1990 in Francistown and showed that research policies in most countries did not reflect the role of traditional medicine in the delivery of health care.
The recent Vaccination Day in Motokwe, orchestrated through collaborative efforts between UNICEF, USAID, BRCS, and the Ministry of Health, underscores a commendable stride towards fortifying child health services.The painful reality as reflected by the Ministry of Health's data regarding the decline in routine immunisation coverage since the onset of the pandemic, is a cause for concern.It underscores the urgent need to address the...