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Contaminated water takes its toll in Karachi
While the authorities appeared relaxed after taking some preliminary measures against an outbreak of gastro-enteritis, the death of 11 children has been confirmed from Landhi and Korangi, Karachi.
Last week six of the fatalities were reported from Dawood Challi (UC-9) and one from Awami Colony, where people had reportedly been consuming polluted water. The death of a child had been confirmed earlier.
About 30 patients were taken to the Sindh Government Hospital, Korangi, and another 250 were taken to the Sessi Hospital, Landhi. However, the children died before they could be provided medical aid.
A senior health official said the affected people had been shifted to the two nearby hospitals. Some emergency relief camps had also been set up by the authorities.
A doctor said the patients generally complained of severe diarrhoea with vomiting. Some residents of the affected area said the water supplied to them was not of good quality.
“And the recent rain made matters much worse,” said one of them.
Seminar on materials
The ninth international symposium on advanced materials opened in Islamabad earlier this week with a firm resolve from the scientific community to foster closer relations.
The four-day-event — attended by more than 50 scientists and researchers from 14 counties, besides about 200 local participants — was organized by the Khan Research Laboratories. Inaugurating the symposium, Federal Minister for Science and Technology Chaudhry Nouraiz Shakoor called for better cooperation between scientists and researchers hailing from different countries.
“We need to clearly focus on our national developmental goals, like other Asian countries such as Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan,” said the minister. He expressed the hope that, fired with the commitment to work hard, Pakistani scientists and researchers would help usher in a period of prosperity and welfare.
Elaborating upon the government’s policies, the minister informed the gathering that during the last four years, budgetary allocations in the science and technology sector had been increased tremendously. Some 152 development projects, worth about Rs12 billion, were launched, while more than Rs1 billion had been earmarked for post-doctoral fellowship programmes.
Japanese expertise
Japanese experts visiting Sialkot announced that they would be providing technical assistance to Pakistani manufacturers and exporters of leather products.
Talking to journalists in Sialkot early this week, Dr Suporn Koottatep and Prof Tayjoohwa of the Asian Productivity Organization, Japan, said the Pakistani leather industry had considerable potential. They also expressed their satisfaction over the preventive measures adopted by Pakistani manufacturers to purge their industry of environment pollution.
The Japanese experts visited the Cleaner Production Centre, the Leather Products Development Institute and some leading industrial units. During their five-day stay, the Japanese experts also took part in a seminar on “Leather techniques development”.
Digital divide
Pakistan has called upon the international community to accelerate the pace of intervention aimed at bridging the digital divide which separates the rich countries from the poor ones.
A dispatch received from Pakistan’s permanent mission to the United Nations offices in Geneva said Ambassador Masood Khan had urged governments, businesses, private citizens and organizations to work together for an equitable and judicious use of internet resources so that the poor could be brought at par with the well-off people.
Mr Khan, who recently became the chairman of the Committee on Internet Governance, was speaking at a civil society orientation session held on the eve of a two-week meeting in which delegates from all over the world would finalize documents for the World Summit on Information Society. The summit is scheduled to be held in Tunis in mid-November.
In his statement, Mr Khan called for ways and means to build capacity in the poor countries through assistance in the areas of telephony and low-cost computers. “Many countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia need special attention,” he pointed out, adding that the developing countries which had made some progress in information technology also needed assistance. — Sci-tech World report
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