KARACHI: The arrival of more than a dozen people bitten by stray dogs to the Indus Hospital’s rabies prevention centre on Saturday from a single neighbourhood of the city sat alarm bells ringing and highlighted the gravity of the issue that has been ignored by the authorities for a long time.

Officials at the hospital confirmed that their rabies centre had received more than a dozen people, a good half of them were children and two women, who were bitten by dogs in Korangi No 3.

The issue has created quite a panic in the neighbourhood, which along with several other impoverished localities report dozens of the cases of animal bites, most of them are dog bite cases.

With shortage of the required vaccine and medicines because of certain issues involving their import from India, the problem is turning graver and threatening many human lives.

Aftab Gohar, team leader at the Indus Hospital’s rabies prevention centre, said at least 12 people were got inflicted with the dog bite in Korangi No 3 who reached the facility in the space of two hour on Saturday afternoon.

He said three of them — a child, a woman and a man — suffered serious wounds in the face and other parts of the bodies. They would require plastic surgery in addition to the first aid and vaccination, which all of them had received.

Mr Gohar said the seriously wounded people had been called up for the required plastic surgery treatment, etc, for coming days.

He said the facility had been receiving around two dozen people suffering from animal bites, most of them dog bites, on a daily basis. However, arrival of more than a dozen people from the same locality had virtually alarmed how grave the problem was turning into.

“Most of them have sustained category-3 injuries, which are deemed as the most critical in the medical jargon. All of them are severely bitten at face, arm and legs,” he said.

Around 24,000 dog bite cases in 2018

Figures show around 24,000 dog bite cases have been reported by only three hospitals in the city last year.

As many as 10,288 were reported at the rabies centre of Dr Ruth Pfau Civil Hospital Karachi, some 7,697 at anti-rabies clinic of the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre and around 6,000 at the Indus Hospital’s rabies centre.

“The number of such cases would be much higher if all figures are correctly pooled,” said an expert.

The number of stray dogs is on the rise and poses as serious public health issue in the city as none of the authorities have plans to get rid of it.

Experts said rabies is a vaccine preventable disease, which turned fatal if a person got a full-blown viral infection.

The Indus Hospital officials said they had launched a programme to vaccinate dogs against the disease and for birth control in Ibrahim Hyderi area. Some 4,000 dogs have been vaccinated and many of them given treatment for birth control.

However, such an effort is yet to be launched in the rest of the sprawling city.

Most dog bite cases are reported from areas like Korangi, Landhi, Surjani, North Karachi, New Karachi, Baldia, Orangi, Keamari, Mehmoodabad, Liaquatabad, etc.

Most public sector hospitals are facing shortage of rabies vaccine and related medicines as the cheapest drugs from India are no longer smoothly arriving for host of issues involving politics in the region and trade.

Published in Dawn, January 6th, 2019