Moh cares for over 41,000 with disabilities

Khaled Al-Sahlawi

The Ministry of Health offers due services to all persons with disabilities in Kuwait, who hit 41,330 till the first quarter of 2016, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Health Khaled Al-Sahlawi, citing statistics of the Public Authority for Disabled Affairs (PADA). Disabilities are various, mental, physical, visual and auditory, Al-Sahlawi added in a press statement yesterday as the ministry marked the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

The theme adopted by the ministry this year is ‘Achieving 17 goals for the future we aspire to,’ he said, apparently referring to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on the UN 2030 Agenda. Choosing the motto aims to encourage removing obstacles hindering merging the persons with disabilities into the society, the senior official said, noting that the ministry offers due health care to the disabled through specialists of medical and rehabilitations assistance.

Sahlawi stressed the vital necessity of pre-marriage medical tests to discover cases with genetic predisposition to produce potentially children with disabilities. The ministry has designed a program to examine newly born babies for 22 diseases that include hereditary and genetic ones, together with some cases of hormonal imbalances that may lead to mental disabilities on the long-term, he noted.