After five days, the patient was completely dehydrated, peeled skin, bone structure horribly emerged She can barely move. "There is a dead gaze in her eyes. There is not a drop of fluid in this woman. It doesn't look good for this woman, the host, Kojo Yankson observed.

And it didn't look good. She died of Cholera barely 10 minutes later.

"We have ourselves to blame", the family members told the Super Morning Show team who had  the shock of their reporting lives when they trooped to the La General Hospital to investigate the outbreak of the punishment for poor hygiene - Cholera.

"The hospital can admit only thirteen at a time, Senior Health administrator at La General hospital Philip, said. He revealed they had recorded  683 cases since  July 9th".

Out Patients Department of the La General Hospital, Accra

"We lost 8 of them - two Nigerians and six Ghanaians. Children represent 6% of those affected including a 11 month old baby. Last night [alone] from midnight [in 6 hours], we received 25 cases. Most of the cases are from La Community, some from Osu, Teshie...one from Arts centre".

Arts Centre?.....Now that's a definite place, a place you can point out and readily investigate.

So off they went to check out the place where Ghana's creativity is tested, where art works are carved out and sold to tourists and to find out how the community, also carved out by shacks and slums also tested for cholera.

The Arts Center or Centre for National Culture is a place where  creativity is deliberate and indigenous. Tourists swarm in their numbers clucthing bottled mineral water - a natural anti cholera vaccine.

It is a place where any tourist would want to visit in Ghana, Joy FM's Sedem Ofori said.

Kojo Yankson and Sedem look on while the hospital administrator explains a point.

"At East Legon you have traffic, at Airport, you have zebra crossing, at the  Arts centre we have [open] gutters" Kojo Yankson observed.

Gutters, filled with brownish stagnant water is a stew of feaces, piss and meatball sizes of discarded food.

And it carried water used to wash dead bodies at the mortuary straight to the sea - and many black polythene bags, a packaging for excreta

Tracing cholera's march into the sea

The thin poorly constructed outlets wire up the community, meandering through stalls, food joints, partitioning shacks and down into the sea just behind the shanty town.

The Arts Center lines up with the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoluem, named after the man who believed the Ghanaian is capable of handling their own affairs - quite ironically.

The Supreme Court is a jog away - the bastion of Ghana's fine laws waiting to jump from the dusty books into real action, captain planet style.

The Black Stars square close by confirms our independence. But there is no public toilet to confirm the presence of government.

According to Joy FM's Sedem Ofori, it used to be a small place but after a prostitution joint, Soldier Bar, was demolished, the people there moved in to the Arts Centre turning it into a sprawling network of filth, feaces and festering food.

It will be easy to throw up the need for sensitization campaigns as a remedy - until you speak to a 'kooko' [porridge] seller who rattled off a comprehensive understanding of cholera -- causes and prevention -- while standing and selling next to a gutter which was cooking with ingredients for the deadly disease.

So shred up that suggestion. Shred it.

Nobody gets sensitized about attending natures call. When a man's heart beat is going dead, doctors often shock the body with some two iron-looking instruments. When a peoples senses about personal hygiene is dead, two irons - law and enforcement is what is needed to shook up the body.

The 'kooko seller' offered her defense,  "at midnight, I often wake up and clean the gutter but still people persist in littering the gutter. It is the people who just don't want to be neat" she explained in Twi, a local language.

An Assembly Member Henry Kottei confirmed this view "at first people ease themselves on the park up there, but we have managed to stop the practice. It is stubbornness that is killing the people"

And just as the interview was going on, a man emerged from the shack and manned his manhood into a perpendicular position, picked his spot and - peed - close to women who were cleaning the gutter nearby.

At the Art Center, it cost 50 pesewas to use a privately managed public toilet. The same amount you need to buy  'kooko' for breakfast.

So it will take 1 Ghana cedis to buy kooko and dispose it off maybe three days later. And although the people here don't care where they pee, they care for money to pay for services.

Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) used in treating cholera costs as much as paying to visit the loo at Art Center. But 50p at Arts Center is just unaffordable for people.

The people there want a free public toilet else a free pee in the gutter, or free defecation at the sea side.

"Now...hmmm I don't think the government can provide free public toilet. We are on a polluter-pay principle now" an Assembly member gave the despairing news to the locals.

Kojo Yankson painted a very familiar picture of Cholera's circle of life.

"As a man stood on the hill to bath, the water washed off his body into the gutter, it energised the semi solid feaces into free-flowing rush  and finally settles into a small puddle some 100 meters away, close to the sea. The concentrated foul scent is strong enough to attract a lanky dog to sniff around. A child follows after the dog  to play with his pet and while they are at it, a mother comes along, annoyed her son is dirty. She carries him home and hours later she is in the kitchen.

You and I were not there. But if the child gets rushed to the La polyclinic, you know who was there - cholera.

A dead body carried off into the mortuary