90 percent of disabilities preventable

Caption:  Cheshire Disability Services General Manager Bernard Ayieko.

By MATTHEW VARI

Sunday, July 10, 2016 (PNG)

NINETY percent of disability cases are preventable, according to Cheshire Disability Services General Manager Bernard Ayieko during the signing of an MoU with Digicel PNG Foundation during the week.

He said apart from addressing disabilities as a focus area, prevention was a major aspect many did not understand as a means to prevent up to 90 percent of disable cases in the community.

“When you talk about prevention, it means that actually up to 90 percent of disabilities are actually preventable and we can’t prevent them if we do not know the causes,” Ayieko said.

“Once we know the causes we are able to know how we can prevent them and therefore minimise the incidences of disabilities occurring.”

“Now everybody that is alive is actually vulnerable to a disability, but the level of vulnerability is dependent on a number of factors.”

He said gender also plays a role where women are more likely to vulnerable due to inherited conditions, children, youth, and the elderly which are how vulnerability exchanges with healthcare taking the major burden in occurrence of disability.

“The most important indicator is the availability of appropriate health services in a country. For example where we have very poor or not satisfactory primary healthcare elements like in PNG’s situation and many other developing countries- you will expect that many disabilities will occur,” Ayieko explained.

“Like a case to point is that we have high levels of maternal child health and that is a high critical risk of the probability of disability occurring.”

“So we have to ensure that the communities of which we live and the people that live in the community are all well informed about the possible causes of disabilities and the possible intervention measures, and preventive measures that they need to look at.”