KARACHI: As the monsoon is around the corner, which provides breeding grounds to lethal naegleria fowleri germs, the provincial government has not released funds and resources required for efficient functioning of a committee, it emerged on Tuesday.

The Sindh health ministry had formed the committee last year to check the increasing dangers of naegleria fowleri, commonly called ‘brain-eating amoeba’, but it eventually went dormant when it found no backing from the government.

Initially, the committee worked on its own and shared its primary findings with the media, which shockingly revealed that most neighbourhoods of the city were being supplied with water not chlorinated at all.

Chlorination is the key method to kill the germ and keep the life-taking disease at bay. Another way is to use boiled water while cleaning nose as the germ enters through the nasal cavity of its victim and attacks the brain.

Though not a single death has been caused because of this lethal disease in Sindh so far this year, the officials warned that with monsoon having come closer its germs would get breeding grounds in the shape of stagnant rainwater and water stored in tyres at shops and threaten life as it did last year when more than a dozen people died because of it.

The deadly disease killed 14 people in 2014.

The committee, called the focal group for naegleria, during its first activities last year collected samples of water and results showed that more than half of the city was supplied with water chlorinated much less than the desired level. Even the teams found no chlorination at all at more than 90pc of the pumping houses of the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB), risking the lives of millions of people in the metropolis.

Officials said the committee was provided with no funds for the vehicles and fuel required for its mobility to collect water samples from the length and breadth of the city. The work has virtually come to a halt because of such resource constraints.

The authorities’ claim for investing heavily in public awareness campaign vis-à-vis naegleria has failed to impress anyone as the pamphlets it published might have changed hands in public places but none of them was seen pasted inside hospitals or in the ablution places or outside the mosques where people could contract the disease by rinsing their noses with unsafe and poorly chlorinated water.

Officials earlier said the germ could potentially approach the victim’s brain through the nasal cavity during ablution at home or in mosques where water supplies were not safely chlorinated or boiled.

The appalling rise in the frequency of deaths because of the fatal infection has exposed the authorities’ claims of taking adequate measures to curb the horrors of the germ, which killed 38 people in the last three years.

The dangerous amoeba, which survives on the bacteria in warm waters and enters human brain through the nasal cavity and eats up its tissues, could only be decimated through proper chlorination or boiling of water.

Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis is defined in medical literature as a rare but typically fatal infection caused by naegleria fowleri, an amoeba found in rivers, lakes, springs, drinking water networks and poorly chlorinated swimming pools.

The illness attacks a healthy person, three to seven days after exposure to contaminated water with symptoms of headache and slight fever, in some cases associated with sore throat and rhinitis (commonly called stuffy nose).

Published in Dawn, June 15th, 2016