PESHAWAR, July 27: The NWFP health department has locked horns with Canada-based donor organisation Micro Nutrient Initiative (MI) over appointment of the latter’s provincial coordinator to strengthen its wheat enrichment project currently in progress in six districts of the province, sources said.

They said the agency had already selected a doctor for the post but the department insisted on appointment of another person “who does not qualify”.

The MI has launched a universal wheat enrichment project with the assistance of Canadian International Development Agency (Cida) to cut down iron deficiency in children and women in 39 districts of Pakistan. The project takes into consideration the national nutrition survey report 2002-3 which says that 30 per cent children and 50 per cent women in Pakistan have iron deficiency related anaemia.

The post, the sources said, was purely of technical nature and a simple graduate, whom the department wanted to be appointed, could not meet its requirements. “We need public health experts,” they added.

Initially, a pilot project “enriching food and enriching lives” has been launched at Peshawar, Nowshera, Mardan, Charsadda and Kohat and is supposed to be extended to the whole country by 2013.

The health department also abstained from a seminar organised by the MI at the Khyber Medical College (KMC) on June 30. Initially, an invitation of the health department said that the director-general health services will be chief guest at the said seminar. The event was also attended by the officials from Ministry of Health Islamabad but nobody from the provincial health department turned up, apparently to show their anger over non-appointment of the person it had recommended for the post.

“We did not give invitation to anyone. Nor we had been informed by anyone,” said, DG Health Dr Jalilur Rehman, adding that there was no row over the appointment issue.

According to the national nutrition survey, 1.2 per cent of the children had visible goitre, 1.3 per cent palpable goitre and 22.9 per cent urinary excretion due to iodine deficiency, while 9.9 per cent of the pregnant women suffered from vitamin-A deficiency and 7.8 per cent from night blindness.

He said 35 wheat mill owners of the NWFP had been made partners to implement the project launched in January this year. The mill owners had been imparted training in flour fortification (FF) while quality control micro-feeders would be installed at roller-flour mills at the cost of Rs 3.4 million. Likewise, the DG Health said, a monitoring and evaluation system had been put in place to assess the impact of FF on anaemia patients. The results were positive, the project would be replicated in other parts of the province.

He said a system had been developed for capacity-building of local health professionals for testing and monitoring of fortified flour. He said 124 kg of wheat is consumed by one person in a year in the NWFP whereas the total annual consumption of wheat in the province is 3.38 million tons. If this much wheat flour was fortified at mills, it would bring down incidence of anaemia among children and women to a great extent.

An official at the health department said the government was not relieving the doctor selected by the MI for the post. He said that, as a rule, the doctor was bound to seek permission from the department, which he had obtained, yet he had not been relieved.

Sources in the MI said that the doctor had got permission from the department and high officials of the health department were also part of the panel that had conducted his interview.

The sources said the MI could abandon its project in the NWFP if the health department continued to sticks to its ‘demand’.