| March 17, 2003 | Monday | Muharram 13, 1424 |
A familiar ring
About air, sun, water and coal
Bad attitudes
NO sooner had fears of a Congo Fever outbreak in Rawalpindi been put to rest - with the blood test results of three suspected cases coming back from South Africa as negative, when it was reported that a new patient had been admitted to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences with bleeding from the nose and gums, a symptom associated with the disease.
The Crimean Congo Haemorrhagic Fever scare broke out about three weeks ago when three patients said to be bearing symptoms of the disease died in two different government hospitals in Rawalpindi. One was a woman patient and the other were two small brothers who died within hours of each other.
Blood test reports of the three victims from South Africa’s National Institute of Virology, where the samples were sent, have turned out to be negative for Congo Fever. The report of the fourth and latest woman patient at PIMS is being awaited.
Doctors at PIMS, however, do not think the patient has Congo Fever either since she doesn’t have other related symptoms like fever.
Why then the false alarm?
Inefficient diagnosis plus panic within the healthcare community caused the false alarm, says Dr Abid (not his real name), a doctor in Islamabad who has been associated with Congo Fever cases.
Bleeding from the nose and gums or excessive bleeding is not a symptom exclusive to Congo Fever. This symptom of haemorrhage is related to other diseases including the hereditary blood disease, haemophilia, he explains.
One can understand the healthcare community’s apprehensions, given the much-publicized death of a young lady doctor from Congo Fever a year ago in Rawalpindi. But Dr Abid believes this does not quite justify the panicky reaction of some members of the healthcare community recently on seeing patients with haemorrhage.
The following is the inside story of how the woman patient who died three weeks ago at a government hospital in Rawalpindi was diagnosed with suspected Congo Fever.
The patient was having a caesarian operation when excessive bleeding occurred. Someone who was handling the patient without protective gloves was told to be careful lest the patient turned out to be infected with the Congo virus. The patient, who died from excessive haemorrhage, was thus diagnosed with suspected Congo Fever!
Similarly, in the case of the latest suspected Congo Fever patient warded at PIMS, she had first been brought to the Rawalpindi hospital where the woman having the caesarian operation had died a few weeks earlier. Since she was bleeding from the nose and mouth, Congo fever was immediately suspected.
But instead of isolating her in a separate ward and investigating the case further, the patient was quickly bundled off in an ambulance and sent to PIMS.
In addition to inaccurate diagnosis, says Dr Abid, the above incident points to another shortcoming in our hospitals - the lack of special isolation rooms or wards where patients with contagious diseases can be isolated from the rest of the hospital.
An isolation room or ward is a necessary facility in any modern hospital, says Dr Abid. The facility is designed to minimize human contact as well as microbial contact. Anyone entering the isolation ward will have to put on the full paraphernalia including special gowns, masks, goggles, gloves and boots.
But out of the five major government hospitals in the twin cities, only the Children’s Hospital at PIMS has a proper isolation ward, says the doctor. Others make temporary arrangements whenever the need arises.
The lack of a permanent isolation facility in our hospitals could be a factor contributing to the recent panic reaction among some of our healthcare workers, suggests Dr Abid. With this facility, there would be less fear of contracting contagious diseases since suspected cases would be immediately placed in the specially equipped isolation rooms.
The good news, however, is that Pakistan will soon be having its own laboratory facility to test blood samples for Congo Fever or any other form of viral haemorrhagic fever, reveals Dr Abid.
The World Health Organization is helping Pakistan to establish this facility, known as the P-3 laboratory, at the National Institute of Health in Islamabad under a special programme. Once the facility is in place, which may be as soon as in six months’ time, blood samples of suspected cases of Congo Fever will no longer need to be sent all the way to South Africa for verification.
Notwithstanding the recent false alarm, it is essential that the healthcare community remains on the alert for patients suspected to be infected with the Congo virus, cautions the medical expert on Congo Fever.
For according to him, out of the twenty over blood samples of suspected Congo Fever cases sent to South Africa for verification during the past eight months, one case had turned out to be positive.
Rawalpindi who had died of suspected Congo Fever a year ago, also tested positive for the disease.
Although cases of Congo Fever in Pakistan have remained few and isolated, the healthcare community will need to continue to be vigilant - without being panicky - and take all the necessary precautions in dealing with suspected cases of contagious diseases.
After all, says Dr Abid, we don’t want to have to wait for an epidemic to occur before we start taking precautionary action.
New roles for old players. We seem to be going back once again to square one. The talk here these days has that familiar ring which one hears when a change of guard at the top starts looking all but imminent. But, then, how could that be? A new parliament has just been inducted. The elected governments at the centre and the provinces have just started functioning. And it is not even six months since the elections.
Of course, normally, one starts hearing such gossip only a couple of years after a government has come into power. And the gossip turns into common knowledge when most of our chattering classes begin chatting about secret meetings between the elected opposition and the top officials of the intelligence agencies.
And then everyone begins guessing about when the leaders of these opposition parties will begin opening inviting the army to dismiss the elected government.
Interestingly, this time it is not the elected opposition which is meeting the intelligence agencies secretly or inviting the army to take over, but it is the latter which is wooing the ruling alliance publicly to firm up its support beyond any doubt for the agency’s efforts to keep the army chief safe and secure in the office of president for the next five years.
If one were to go by what the chattering classes here have already started saying, the president is said to be furious at the ruling alliance and its leaders for not foiling so far the opposition’s attempts to disrupt the proceedings of parliament. He is said to have reprimanded the leadership of the PML-Q for even agreeing to hold talks with the opposition on the LFO. His friends reportedly believe that the ruling alliance by agreeing to talk with the opposition on the LFO has actually conceded that there could be a give and take on the matter of the president’s uniform and his election.
Some of his close confidants reportedly feel that the government alliance perceives immense political benefits for itself in the continuation of the opposition’s protest. In fact the detractors of Jamali and Shujaat who are said to have the ear of the president as well seem convinced that if he did not send the newly elected members home soon, they would successfully gang up against him and join hands to send him back to the barracks.
It was perhaps in order not to allow the ruling party the powers to de-fang the president through parliament on its own that those who designed the election results gave the PML-Q a majority totally dependent on smaller parties fully under the control of the secret agencies. And it was perhaps to keep the ruling alliance at bay all the time that the opposition was allowed to come in such a formidable strength. But then perhaps the designers did not reckon with the resourcefulness of the civilian politicians who have become adept at working with the art of the possible.
So, now for the first time in Pakistan’s political history one is witnessing the strange phenomenon of the ISI wooing a set of civilian politicians to save the army chief from another set of the same species rather than the last two seeking the help as usual of the intelligence agency against each other. The actors who play crucial roles in the game of change of guards in Pakistan seem to be at it again.
Interestingly, the argument used by the ISI at last week’s press briefing for the local editors to justify the agency’s going public implied that the intelligence agency had lost confidence in the ability of the information ministry as well as its own inter-services public relations department to help improve its image which it has come to believe was being tarnished abroad by the Indian media.
None of the world famous intelligence agencies like America’s CIA, Mossad of Israel and the KGB of the defunct Soviet Union, etc., ever had a good image abroad. But they were not worried about it. In fact they enjoyed the notoriety and hoped that this would enhance their image of being fearsome among their enemies.
Actually it is the governments of the day which own the achievements as well as the failures of their intelligence agencies. And the members of these agencies who perform for their countries far away from the glare of publicity normally fade away unsung and unheralded.
But in the case of Pakistan this does not appear to be so. Even our former ISI chiefs do not want to fade away. One former ISI chief, Javed Ashraf Qazi, has recently been elected a senator on the PML-Q ticket.
Another one, Lt-Gen (retd) Rana was made secretary, defence, by the present government. He is now an ambassador. Hamid Gul has his own political party and is known to have admitted that as the ISI chief he was instrumental in putting together the IJI, an electoral alliance. Another ISI chief, Javed Nasir, has recently gone public about his achievements in the international arena when he was heading the agency.— ONLOOKER
HOW careless and casual, if not actually dumb, the high-level bureaucrats, and more than bureaucrats the political leaders of this city and province, have been all these years can be seen by the rambling and incoherent manner they talk about coal deposits and coal-based electric power. It was only last year, or may be the year before, that they began to talk about the discovery of enormous coal deposits in this province.
Even now, with the fact of these deposits established beyond any reasonable doubt, nobody can say with any confidence what is the extent of this resource and what exactly its quality. Not many people are talking about it. But the few who are, refer to it in a style that is more ecstatic and poetic than precise. For the optimist there is the proverbial straw now to hang on to.
An initial agreement has been signed between the officials of the government of Sindh and a Chinese power company. If all goes as planned, this project may be in production four years from now — at the earliest. What stands out at the moment is the ‘If’ about everything going well, which is not very often, if experience means any thing. One would hate to be a spoilsport. Let us thank all our benefactors for small mercies, when that is all we have on the table. A beginning has been attempted, not yet made, mind you.
The point to note is that it has taken us more than half a century to come to know that in Sindh we are sitting on what are vaguely claimed to be some of the largest coal deposits in the womb of our good earth. For all these years we were blissfully unaware of an asset of such potential.
How well we know about this asset? Not very precisely. If any systematic effort has been made to locate these deposits, and estimate the size and establish the quality, it remains the provincial government’s best-kept secret. As a measure of the interest our investors take in doing their homework about an asset with very considerable potential for development, we may note that no industrial house, or investment company in Karachi, Sindh or Pakistan, has so far taken the trouble to stir out of its groove and launch any study or survey of this precious resource.
Going by the stray whispers that the newspapers pick up in their routine strides, it would appear that one or two projects are now beginning to take shape. There is, however, no sign of any sense of urgency. It is the same snail’s pace at which the files reluctantly crawl from one ‘Burra Sahib’s’ table to the next ‘Burra Sahib’s’ desk. So far no local investor or enterprise has shown any awareness, let alone active interest, in this field.
Coal is not the only asset of immense potential that is available in plenty - and free. Of the renewable sources of energy, Karachi and Sindh have more than anywhere else in Pakistan. There is the sea breeze that costs nothing. It is available in limitless abundance and all the time. All it needs is to be converted into power and then into assets of infinite variety and value.
Sindh and Balochistan together have some 1,800 miles of coastline, swept by the eternally playful (or, restless?) sea breeze. Is it not amazing, indeed incredible, that our administrators and politicians and investors and industrialists and bankers couldn’t care less about this asset? Converting breeze into power is not a new fangled idea. It is as old as the sons of Adam. In Karachi we haven’t yet heard about it clearly enough!
When you intelligently think of the coastline, it must occur to you that it is here that we can plant and grow palm, the finest source of cooking oil. Some time ago, somebody was heard talking about securing guidance, expertise and also joint enterprise with brotherly Malaysia. Splendid idea. But a barren idea if there is nobody with the good sense to pursue it with any measure of system and seriousness. Karachi is awash with cooking oil plants. They are all happy with imported oil. How smug can you get?
Among renewable energy assets, why not count on sunshine? We have all the sunshine we need and so much to spare, when you come to think of it. It is no exaggeration to say that our skies are clear each one of the 365 days we have in a year, and 366 days every fourth year. The days are bright as bright can be. Evidently, what we do not have is too many bright minds and open eyes that can think clearly and see the power potential that sunshine offers.
Something close to half of the 14 million people that live here and grumble all the time about ‘scarcity’ of water. This is the mild expression for absence of water. To have dry taps by the seaside is a marvel that would take nothing short of our ‘do-little’ genius. Across the narrow stretch of the Gulf, the enterprising sheikhdoms have converted their desert into gardens, orchards, cricket grounds and golf courses that would outshine similar facilities in the greenest of countries. Here we are, twiddling our thumbs and wailing about water all the time.
At some irregular intervals one hears that the Defence Housing Authority is thinking of setting up a desalination plant. Why only thinking? And why now? If there was any intelligent thinking at all, provision of water, clean and in plenty, should have preceded the digging of the foundation of the first structure in the DHA. How little we learn from our history. The majestic builders that they were, the Mughals’ first thought always was about water when they set about building anything, be it a fort, or a palace, or a cantonment or, of course, a garden.
Here we have a whole series of housing complexes fathered by the well-funded DHA, and no reliable, regular, adequate and independent system of water supply. They are now thinking of a desalination unit. How very thoughtful! Call it whatever you like, it is not planning. Or it is planning from top downwards. One should expect the DHA, with its imposing housing projects dotted all over the country, to lead in thoughtful planning. Come to think of town planning, North Nazimabad was a model available to the DHA to follow — if the DHA did fancy the trouble of leading.
When it comes to ban manners and impropriety, you could say Karachiites seem to take the cake. Most people reading would agree that most people in the city, and perhaps all over the country, lack basic good sense and manners. For example, who hasn’t been in a situation, say, while driving, of coming across another motorist who used the most vulgar of expletives freely during a minor quarrel? Or, who hasn’t encountered people who have not had the decency of evening saying a small thank you when you might have opened a door for them or let them pass in front of you in a queue?
No one likes to run down one’s own city or people in the pursuit of some sick, sadistic quest for self-depreciation, but the sad reality is that many people in this city are simply not very nice people. After all, we are not the most politically correct of people and reference to one’s skin colour are quite common. By nice, one doesn’t imply that they should have flowers in their hair and sunshine in their eyes, but rather that one would expect them to appreciate small gestures of common courtesy that others make towards them out of civic sense. Take a look around. This wave of bad manners and a thankless attitude towards other people is everywhere, in every profession, in all spheres of life.
Have you noticed that hardly ever will a shopkeeper smile or even thank you for your patronizing his establishment? Many shopkeepers treat their customers like an unwanted burden, seemingly chastizing them for disturbing their siesta. And when was the last time you got on a public bus and the conductor actually acknowledged you as a human being and treated you as such instead of herding you like chattel (this is pre-Green bus we’re talking about)? How many people are given the respect patrons deserve when dealing with a bank teller after having to wait an unbearably long time in the queue? Or has anyone ever said a polite ‘thank you’ if you kept the door open for them or waited for them inside a lift? On the road, how many verbal spats and cussing matches does one go through daily behind the wheel, never mind the fisticuffs that occur after the occasional fender bender? Road rage is quite common on Karachi’s streets.
The good Samaritan is a dying breed, not just here, but everywhere. What is the root of this malaise? Ignorance? The weary effects of globalization? The fallout of a programmed industrial lifestyle? Or, is it all of the above? Only Providence holds the answer to that. But if people just realized that the person next to them was having just as bad a day as themselves, maybe we could cut each other some slack and even — and this is asking a lot — treat each other with dignity and respect.
An MBA student at the University of Karachi had written in the Notebook’s Feb. 17 edition about an incident on campus which had caused a disruption in her academic timetable and prevented a class from being held. In response to her note, we received emails from at least three other KU students basically defending the university (two of these were published the following week).
Now, the student who had written about the class disruption has sent in a kind of a rebuttal to what those defending KU had written. She said she had never said anything about the university’s teachers or about the quality of teaching.
“I had not mentioned a single word against the teachers. All I was complaining about was the hold student organizations seem to have on the university.” She also said that during orientation, the new students were never told that they could take their problems to a student adviser, something that one of the KU defenders had suggested.
It is incredible how our big mobile phone companies manage to get away with murder. They provide services that are so bad that even a small shop would be ashamed off them. Especially bad is the service that two of the bigger companies provide.
One of these companies keeps on proclaiming that it has the largest number of mobile phone users in the country. Only recently, the company announced that it would double the number of connections in the next couple of years. Well God help their new customers given the way things are going for their existing clients. Contrary to the claims of its management this company is more known for its network always being busy or for bad connectivity.
Often when you call, a ‘network busy’ signal comes. Since this happens quite a lot, it’s very possible that just when you have to make a really urgent call, you will find the network busy signal. Even if you do manage to get through, you will find the line ‘dropping’ in the middle of a conversation. Both these situations can be extremely frustrating, and really the last thing one needs in the middle of an emergency.
The other cell phone company has come out with a prepaid package that offers free talking time on its connections every night. A friend who has this connection says that not once has she been able to do this. “A busy tone is all the free talking time you get,” she says.
Besides being immensely frustrating, one can only but wonder why the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority does not do anything to take these mobile phone providers to task.
If they are unable to handle the present number of subscribers, as is rather obvious, they shouldn’t be allowed to expand.
A keen reader of the Notebook, Professor Ejaz Mian of the IBA’s marketing department, sent in an email wondering whether his poem on International Women’s Day could be published. The day has gone but since the Notebook did not carry anything of significance on it, there seemed to be no harm in carrying the professor’s poetry.
So here goes: “You are by no means an ordinary woman but a woman nevertheless/For centuries you had a raw deal/ It has been same through all history/ Man has worshipped you and man has exploited you/ You have given yourself entirely at the mercy of man in form of mother, sister, daughter, wife, queen, slave, concubine/ You are creator of man and carrier of life in the universe/ Your nature has ‘nurture’ and by you comes all that is worth having in this world/ Then why don’t you get up and take charge?
“In this war against repression I am with you ready to fight shoulder to shoulder/ But let it be known you have to take charge and lead the way/ You have to be sold on the idea and others of your kind will flock to you/ You were never so close to your destiny as you are today/ Strike the iron for it is hot/ And strike it with full force/ You are the fortunate/ Others of your kind wait for you/ Do it now/ Just do it.”
A regular contributor from the University of Karachi emailed saying that a huge American flag has been painted on the stairs of the commerce department. She said this was obviously a mark of protest against America’s policies and its impending attack on Iraq.
However, she said, it seemed a bit contradictory and hypocritical because the same students who have no problems walking over the American flag often start singing its praises during class discussions.
A reader sent an email with reference to last week’s piece, ‘Something to hide’, on the Lyari Expressway.
Mohammad Saadullah: “There might be many benefits of the Lyari Expressway. One view is that it is a necessity for a city like Karachi and that it will allow for faster and better transportation, especially for commuters. But as you mentioned last Monday, all these benefits come at the cost of displacing around 25,000 families and hence the need for such an expressway does not seem justified. This is especially true for a city that fails to deliver the basic necessities of life to the majority of its inhabitants.
“There was this report in the papers last week that there are about 10,000 street children in Karachi. I would have been more satisfied if the money spent on the expressway was spent on improving the welfare of these street children since after all they are the future of this country.”— By Karachian
Email: karachi_notebook@hotmail.com