Editorial: Ghana Is Paying Billions To Treat A Disease It Could Have Prevented

Four million Ghanaians, according to available statistics, are living with chronic kidney disease, but regrettably, most of them do not know it.

The condition advances without symptoms, recruiting patients silently until it reaches the stage where the only available interventions, dialysis and transplantation, are beyond the financial reach of the overwhelming majority of families in this country. By the time the diagnosis arrives, the damage is done not only to the body, to the household economy, but increasingly to the national budget.

This is not a distant threat, as it is a crisis already in progress and Ghana is paying for it in the most expensive way possible at the back end, when prevention has failed and treatment is all that remains.

The newly established Ghana Medical Trust Fund has allocated GH¢2.9 billion in 2026 alone to treat kidney and cardiovascular diseases. That figure is not a measure of the government’s generosity. It is a measure of how badly the country has already lost ground on prevention.

The question that demands an answer is not whether Ghana faces a public health emergency. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that non-communicable diseases — hypertension, diabetes and the kidney failures account for roughly 45 percent of all deaths in Ghana. The question is why in the full view of these figures, the country still lacks a mandatory front-of-pack warning labelling policy for food products high in sugar, salt and unhealthy fats.

The link between diet and this disease burden is not contested. Ultra-processed foods, instant noodles, sugary beverages, packaged snacks have flooded Ghana’s urban and rural markets over the past decade. They are cheap, heavily marketed, including to children.

But they are nutritionally corrosive, contributing to the metabolic stress that according to experts destroy blood vessels, strains the heart and overwhelms the kidneys. The food environment has changed faster than the regulatory environment designed to govern it and this preventable gap is killing people.

Chile demonstrated over a decade ago that mandatory front-of-pack warning labels measurably reduce the purchase and consumption of harmful food products. Mexico followed. In Africa, South Africa has begun implementation. Nigeria and Kenya are developing their own frameworks.

Ghana, meanwhile, has basic labelling requirements and an advocacy campaign, but no operational policy, no gazetted regulation, no parliamentary instrument and no published timeline for when one might arrive.

This is where The Chronicle thinks the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) must be pressed to give a direct account of itself. The FDA is not a weak institution. It is among the more capable regulatory bodies on the continent, with the technical competence and the legal mandate to act.

What it has not done is move. The question of why, whether industry resistance has slowed internal deliberations, whether the relevant ministerial directive has stalled, whether a draft policy exists, but has not been brought to Parliament, deserves a public answer. Regulatory silence on a question of this consequence is not neutrality. It is a choice and Ghanaians are entitled to know whose interests that choice serves.

The Chronicle certainly supports SEND Ghana and its partners’ push for mandatory front-of-pack warning labelling. But support for the policy is insufficient without accountability for the delay. The FDA should publish, within a reasonable time, a clear timeline for operationalising a mandatory front-of-pack warning label framework. The Ministry of Health should require it; Parliament’s health committee should demand it.

Ghana is spending billions treating what better information, delivered earlier and more clearly, could help prevent. That, we dare say, is not a health policy – it is an admission of failure dressed as a budget line.

 

 

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