By Manuel Odeny

The Migori county government, through the department of health, has partnered with Clubfoot Care for Kenya (CCK) to kick out the disease from the county.

On Friday clinical officers and nurses in charge of all health centers and dispensaries in the county held a sensitization training at Migori County Referral Hospital within Migori town to help in referring and quickly responding to new-born children with clubfoot for quick, free, and timely treatment.

The partnership will see a free clubfoot clinic running every Thursday after eight doctors were specially trained to help treat clubfoot alongside a trained counsellor for parents at the facility.

Before patients had to be referred to Kisii, Kisumu or Kendu Bay Adventist Hospital in Homa Bay for treatment.

The partnership will see plasters used for treatment and special shoes provided for free and timely adherence to schedules followed.

Fredrick Otieno, the lead physiotherapist at MCRH said while clubfoot is congenital and real case is not known, it is still be treated for infants until the age of five years.

“After the five years until around 18 years a patient can still be treated but surgically, so the biggest challenge is getting infants who are still young to reverse a deformity which can be controlled easily,” Otieno said.

Globally out of a thousand live births, one child is born with clubfoot and in Kenya the number of children born with the deformity is 2,000 annually a number which is still 2,000 higher.

In Migori annually about 40 children are born with the deformity, with about four being treated at Migori County Referral Hospital each month.

Migori still has high incident rates and earlier children not treated, creating a backlog which has seen medics trained on helping to find patients for referral at Migori County Referral Hospital.

If not treated on time, clubfoot victims face lifelong education and social challenges with most being completely locked out of physically demanding professions like police and army recruitment.

Isaac Mutua, an official with CCK said by working with Migori the organisation has set her footprint among 22 counties in Kenya and said the biggest challenge of ending clubfoot is parents who report the disease and deformity late because of stigma.

“That is why we start our journey by offering counselling and giving capacity to our medics manning hospitals in rural set up to move up for speedy referral,” Mutua said.