KARACHI, March 28: Infectious diseases are now the world’s biggest killer of children and young adults. And in Pakistan they rank, after heart disease, as the leading cause of fatalities among the adult population.
Health officials and the community of doctors, therefore, should attach due importance to the infectious diseases discipline. So said speakers at the First International Congress on Infectious Diseases, which opened on Friday evening at the convention centre of Liaquat National Hospital.
The speakers faulted the policymakers for what they believed was their complacency with regard to poor health and nutritional status of the masses, exposing them to a wide range of infections and attending mortality and morbidity.
They regretted that deteriorating socio-economic status of people was taking a heavy toll on the quality of their lives.
“In Pakistan, about 30 per cent of all mortality recorded by the hospitals is attributed to infectious diseases,” said Khalif Bile, Pakistan’s representative to WHO, in his chief guest’s speech.
“These statistics, however, underestimate the (full) burden of infectious diseases.”
Talking about the most lethal infectious disease, Mr Bile said: “In tuberculosis Pakistan ranks as eight among the 22 countries with the highest burden of cases in the world.
“The disease incidence is estimated at 177 per 100,000 Pakistanis, resulting in about 250,000 new cases every year, with the annual death of over 50,000.”
He said the national malaria control programme had defined seven districts in Punjab and 10 each in Sindh, NWFP and Balochistan as high risk areas.
“Hepatitis is also endemic in the country and has the trend of causing serious outbreaks with high morbidity and a mortality that is more prevalent among pregnant women.”
Mr Bile pointed out that a Hepatitis E outbreak in Islamabad, back in 1994, had shown conclusively that no social environment in the country was immune to such tragedies.
“The EPI coverage is unacceptably low in all the provinces and regions. This could be attributed to poor governance of the district health system, the limited number of health workers assigned, lack of sufficient cold chain infrastructure and at times shortage of vaccines and syringes.”
Pakistan’s representative to the WHO said Pakistan had obtained substantial grants from Global Drug Facility, Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria, and The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations.
“Despite the complexity and high burden of communicable diseases in Pakistan, most of these endemic infections can be prevented or treated with affordable tools and medicines which will, in their own right, contribute to poverty alleviation and enhance socio-economic development.”
In his keynote address, Prof J.E. Banatvala, who has come from the UK to attend the conference, stated that infections some of which had spread within particular continents were now also causing major problems in other ones.
Examples of such infections include Dengue, Japanese encephalitis, HIV I and II, and West Nile virus.
Emphasis should be laid upon global surveillance to monitor the trends of various diseases, said Prof Banatvala. Because some vaccines have known to be effective in combating even some carcinomas, the development of vaccines was also important.
Dr Naseem Salahuddin said some private- and public-sector hospitals boasted sophisticated equipment but didn’t attach sufficient importance to infectious diseases which were entirely preventable.
She contended that infectious diseases were poor people’s ailments. “Each day those who live in shantytowns and katchi abadis are at risk of contracting some form of infectious diseases.”
Dr Salahuddin said many of the foreign delegates who were supposed to attend the congress were dissuaded from doing so by their governments. She thanked the nine experts from the UK, US, South Africa, Malaysia and Bangladesh who had honoured their commitments to visit Pakistan.
Dr Altaf Ahmed, in his vote of thanks, said he and his team at the outset had only Rs1,500 but wanted to organize a major international conference. “But today it has been proved that money is not which keeps some of us going.”
Meanwhile, talking to Dawn after the event, Khalif Bile said no case of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which has claimed the lives of at least 18 people in Asia and beyond, had been reported in Pakistan.
In response to a question, he said the World Health Organization didn’t recommend any kind of travel restrictions. “Millions of people travel every day. It’s hardly possible to monitor the health status of each traveller.”
