24 Nov 2019

A senior lecturer at the University of Botswana’s School of Nursing, Dr William Mooketsi Baratedi says nobody should perish because of lack of information on issues pertaining to health and medical check-ups.

Giving a key note address at a two-day Gaborone International Health Expo recently, Dr Baratedi described the event as an occasion where the community was called to be educated on matters pertaining to their health and to be screened.

He said the health exposition was an opportunity for the community to be given ammunition to fight ignorance of Non Communicable Diseases (NCDs).       

He noted that the world, Botswana included, was talking about the 4^th Industrial Revolution, which he said Batswana could not realise if they did not have healthy personnel. Dr Baratedi said a healthy personnel could only be attained and sustained through education and capacitation. He said in an effort to combat communicable diseases, government had signed and adopted international policies, declarations and protocols, such as the one on primary healthcare. 

He observed that  when the country was hopeful of winning the war against communicable diseases, NCDs emerged.

He highlighted that NCD’s were called lifestyle diseases because they were associated with how people ate, behaved and managed body weight. 

Dr Baratedi explained that the danger of such diseases was that they could be present in the body for a long time without being noticed, while. 

“We are not able to notice these conditions during their early stages until the damage is done. 

The good news is that they are preventable,” he said.

He said approximately 463 million adults (aged 20-70) were diabetic, cautioning Batswana to avoid being part of the statistics. 

He further said cancer was ravaging humanity at an alarming rate, stating that many new cancers were being discovered, yet there was still no treatment.   

The objective of the exposition was to bring health services closer to the society. 

It brought together stakeholders and health practitioners to showcase their services. 

“In future, the job of medical doctors should not be about giving people medication, but teaching the public to take care of themselves through diet, exercise and prevention of diseases since prevention is better than cure,” Dr Thabang Dima of Kalafi Medical Centre in Gaborone said.  ends