KNUST BREAKS THROUGH IN MEDICINE

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The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, KNUST, in partnership with the Bonn University of Germany and others, has found treatments for Onchocerciasis popularly known as River Blindness and also Lymphoeedema or elephantiasis. 

This was through the application of doxxycycline. The break through findings have since received international recognition and awards such as the prestigious German Momento Price Award for this year in Berlin. 

The Vice Chancellor of the university, Professor William Otoo Ellis, who disclosed this  announced also, that the feat has already earned KNUST a three-million euro grant  from the German Ministry of Education and Research for the establishment of  Elephantiasis Management Clinics in some endemic communities in Ghana. 

Professor Otoo Ellis made this known at the 6th in the nine-sessions 49th Congregation of the university in Kumasi. 

The Vice Chancellor also announced, that the Head of the Department of Religious Studies of the university, Reverend J.E.T. 

Kuwornu-Adjaottor, has won the William Shakespear’s Research Award for 2015 for his paper on ‘A reading of living water and its relationship with believe in John 4:1-5 through thelens of some Ghanaian mother-tongue translations of the New Testament and a practice in Ghana traditional shrines’. 

Additionally, the Dean of the Faculty of Allied Health Sciences of the university, Dr. Alex Debrah, has been appointed the first African as the Co-XChair of the Planning Committee of the Interscience Conference in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy of the American Society of Microbiology for a three-year period.

 Professor Otoo Ellis said KNUST last May, passed out the last batch of the six thousand trainees from the public nursing and midwifery training schools as part of its mentorship of those schools.

 Touching on the role of the KNUST in the government’s planned upgrading of the public Polytechnics into technical universities, the Vice Chancellor said the university, in partnership with the Cape Coast, Ho and Takoradi Polytechnics, is to run Master of Technology programmes in engineering courses such as Automobile, Civil, Production, Referigeration and Air Condition, Agriculture and Production as well as Construction and Industrial Art. 

The initiative is part of the human resource capacity building programme to position the beneficiary Polytechnics to start the Bachelor degrees in Technology.

 The Chancellor of KNUST and the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu hinted that the public universities in Ghana plan cutting down on their students intake in the coming years. 

This is due to harsh impact of government’s freeze on public sector employment which is making it difficult for them to replace retiring, sick and dead staff. 

Additionally, the dwindling government subvention for the universities is having a serious consequence on the infrastructural expansion and institutional budgets of the universities.

 Otumfuo Osei Tutu therefore appealed to government to permit the public universities to hire the critically needed manpower to beef up their staff. 

The Minister of Education, Professor Naana Jane Opoku Agyemang assured that government will not shirk its responsibility towards financing tertiary education.

However, other stakeholders must also come in with the needed support to resource the universities to live up to their mandates.

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