September 28, 2008	Sunday	Ramazan 27, 1429

KARACHI, Sept 27: A centre meant for counselling and screening of pregnant women against HIV/Aids will start functioning at the Civil Hospital Karachi in the middle of October, said sources in the Sindh Aids Control Programme.

The centre would be the second of its kind in the province. The Prevention of Parents To Child Transmission (PPTCT) Centre was commissioned at the centrally located CHK with the technical assistance of Unicef in 2007, but it could not function smoothly for long and had to be closed down, and was later shifted to the Government Qatar Hospital in Orangi.

The reason given for the scrapping of the CHK centre, the fifth PPTCT in the country at that time, was that the hospital administration had agreed to provide space/rooms in its gynaecology/obstetric department under a memorandum of understanding, but it failed to do so due to inaptitude of some senior officials.

The PPTCT centres work towards minimizing the risk of a newborn being HIV-positive. Under the programme, pregnant women visiting the health-care centres are counselled and asked to undertake an HIV test. If they test positive and prefer to carry the pregnancy through to its full term, they are given drugs to minimise the chance of the virus being transmitted to the infant.

The centre attended 220 pregnant women in 2007. Of them, 202 women consented to be tested for HIV, while one of them was found positive for the dreaded virus.

The Orangi PPTCT under the supervision of a Unicef-sponsored doctor had screened about 60 pregnant women coming from its surrounding areas till June. However none of the reporting pregnant women was found positive for HIV/Aids, while a woman patient of Aids, who was kept on anti-retroviral therapy under the Sindh Aids Control Programme, had safely delivered a baby at the Qatar hospital in the first month of PPTCT there.

Such centres help prevent unintended pregnancies in HIV-positive women and spread awareness of the risks of and safeguards against the deadly virus, it was further said.

According to a source, in view of the CHK’s location and its status attracting women from many parts of the city and other parts of the province, authorities were considering establishing a new PPTCT there.

The provincial manager of the Sindh Aids Control Programme, Dr Mohammad Nasir Jalbani, said that after some fresh persuasions, the medical superintendent of the CHK had agreed to provide an exclusive spacious room for the PPTCT at the gynecology department. SACP will provide furniture and some other facilities to the centre at the CHK, while Unicef will be providing medicines and other technical support.

Replying to a question, he said that a doctor dedicated to the PPTCT would be coming from the CHK staff and the centre would start in a week or so after Eid holidays. We are also working for the establishment of such counseling and screening centres for pregnant women in Larkana, Nawabshah, Mirpurkhas and Hyderabad in phases from January 2009, he said.

He said the centre of excellence meant for registering the Aids positive patients and providing them with free anti-retroviral therapy, which was shifted to the SACP headquarters near JPMC from the Sindh Services Hospital, had once again been shifted to a new location, the CHK.

A referral laboratory established for diagnosis and confirmation of HIV/Aids cases and sexually transmitted infections would also be relocated to the CHK shortly, he added.

He further said that 127 new cases of HIV, one full blown case of Aids, were reported to the SACP during the April-June period. A maximum of 80 HIV positive cases, including four women, lived in the age brackets of 20-34 years.

The HIV persons included 81 injectable drug using males, 22 heterosexual cases, including three women, one mother-to-child transmission case, one homosexual case, and 14 infected due to blood or blood products. The transmission modes in the case of other eight persons could not be known, Dr Jalbani said.