KARACHI, Aug 29: A modern chest unit at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) will be formally inaugurated on Friday.

This was stated by the head of the unit, Dr Nadeem Rizvi, while talking to APP on Thursday.

He said that the unit would have 30 isolation rooms for patients with severe contagious disease or infection and a six- bed intensive care unit. It would soon be equipped with an artificial ventilation facility, he added.

Dr Rizvi said that the new unit had been 50 per cent completed and another block would be added later on. He pointed out that the total cost of the new chest unit would be Rs15 million and it was being built by the JPMC administration in collaboration with the Patient Aid Society. He said that donations from philanthropists would be welcome.

Dr Rizvi said the number of people attending the Out Patient Department (OPD) at the Chest Unit of the JPMC had increased significantly and at present the department was seeing some 1,000 patients per week.

He said that tuberculosis was prevalent more among young people in Pakistan and attributed the rising incidence of the disease to lack of effective tuberculosis programmes, smoking, unchecked advertisements of cigarettes, growing atmospheric pollution and poverty in the country.

He pointed out that according to an estimate some 350,000 people contracted tuberculosis in Pakistan every year but no precise figures were available of the deaths caused by the disease.—APP