Burkina Faso – A new partnership in the fight against sickle cell disease
09/10/2014
After Mali, the DRC, Madagascar, Senegal and Haiti, the fight against sickle cell disease spreads to Burkina Faso.
On 5 September in Ouagadougou, Fondation Pierre Fabre signed a partnership agreement with the Comité d’Initiative contre la Drépanocytose au Burkina (Sickle Cell Disease Initiative Committee in Burkina or CID/B).
The agreement was signed in the presence of French Ambassador Gilles Thibault, the Technical Adviser to the Minister of Health of Burkina Faso and Jacques Godfrain, Treasurer of Fondation Pierre Fabre and former Minister for Cooperation. The objective was to create an information and support centre for this disease in the Burkinabe capital.
A project with three-fold focus
Over a period of four years, the project will be implemented by the CID/B and funded by the Foundation through €300,000 of support. It will focus on three areas :
– Information, education and communication for the population and healthcare worker training by creating an information centre accessible to everyone;
– Access to quality care for the sick by creating a pilot treatment centre at the Saint Camille Medical Centre (CMSC), which will have an outpatient clinic;
– Early screening through introduction of systematic neonatal diagnosis at the CMSC maternity ward.
“Like Fondation Pierre Fabre, those involved in this project have long been committed to the fight against sickle cell disease. They therefore have ample experience to carry out the project”, says Béatrice Garrette, Director General of the Foundation. The CID/B was created in 2006 to involve and mobilise civil society in fighting the disease (sickle cell disease, parents of those with sickle cell disease, physicians and healthcare workers). It plans outreach activities for the general public and training for medical personnel. The CMSC, on the other hand, began seeing patients in 2000.
Making the treatment of the disease a commonplace
The shared history of the CID/B and the Foundation, which began in 2011, opens new horizons to the Burkinabe population, where about 2% of newborns have sickle cell disease. “Kicking off this project is the culmination of a long process with Fondation Pierre Fabre,” said CID/B Coordinator Dramane Banaon, happily. “We hope that, after the project phase, these pilot initiatives will spread across the country. Our goal is that, one day, sickle cell disease will become a neglected disease, not because no-one would be interested in it, but because treatment of it would become commonplace, and sickle cell cases amongst our populations would simply be very residual.”
Dramane Banaon, Gilles Thibault, Béatrice Garrette, Jacques Godfrain.