A total of 12,000 babies with sickle cell are born each year in the country. People with sickle cell, who hardly live beyond 30 years, constitute two per cent of the population. A principal biomedical scientist, Mr George Danquah Damptey, who is also the acting Eastern Regional Biomedical Scientist, made this known at the annual scientific conference of the Ghana Biomedical Scientists Association in Koforidua on Thursday. The conference, on the theme, “The role of the Biomedical Scientist in the Diagnosis of Diseases”, and attended by biomedical scientists drawn from the Eastern Region, was to take stock of the association’s activities over the year and see how best to address inherent challenges to serve patients better. Mr Damptey said because of the large number of sickle cell patients, it had become necessary for couples intending to get married to know their status and be properly counselled, saying it was only through that that the high rate of the disease could be brought down. He said the situation had become critical because couples who wanted to be tested for the disease had to travel long distances to do so and called for the provision of medical laboratories in all state-owned health facilities at the sub-district level to provide such services. Mr Damptey, who dwelt on the testing and diagnosing of other diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis (TB) in the region, called for the training of more biomedical scientists, who he said were in the ratio of 48 to 125 doctors (2:5) in the region. The Deputy Eastern Regional Minister, Mr Ebenezer Tei-Larbi, who was the guest speaker, said since between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of all decisions regarding patients diagnosis and treatment were based on laboratory test results, biomedical scientists should exhibit a lot of professionalism. “Your findings are vital for the treatment of patients and so you must be diligent and professional in your work, so that you produce accurate and reliable results for the management of patients,” he told the biomedical scientists. The government, Mr Tei-Larbi, said would ensure the passage of the Legislative Instrument (LI) that would regulate the practice of biomedical scientists to ensure that only qualified ones would operate in the country. The Deputy Eastern Regional Director of Clinical Care of the Ghana Health Service, Dr W. Addo-Larbi, asked biomedical scientists to render good services with vivid explanations to patients in such a way that they would be satisfied. The Eastern Regional Deputy Director of Public Health, Dr George Bonsu, took the participants through various stages of health service delivery. Earlier, the Eastern Regional Chairman of the association, Mr Francis Abeku Ussher, had said biomedical professionals had, over the past 10 years, developed in terms of academic qualification, infrastructure expansion and career development, making it possible for them to make interventions in diseases such as malaria, HIV, TB and HINI. He enumerated the challenges facing biomedical scientists as lack of continuous supply of reagents and qualified biomedical engineers to repair broken down equipment and called for the redress of those challenges.