ISLAMABAD: Chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on Interior, Senator Rehman Malik, has taken notice of the unavailability of HIV/Aids testing kits and vaccines in the hospitals and laboratories of Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT).

According to an official statement, Mr Malik has asked the chief commissioner to submit a detailed report about the unavailability of HIV/Aids vaccines and testing kits in the ICT hospitals and also inform the committee about availability of anti-rabies and anti-snakebite vaccines, especially in the monsoon season.

He also sought a report from the chief commissioner explaining if there was any existing law that covered the HIV/Aids patients, their rehabilitation, treatment and counselling, once they were diagnosed with HIV/Aids.

Asks Islamabad chief commissioner to submit report on the matter

He said that the Senate Standing Committee on Interior had already taken up the proposal by Senator Azam Swati who suggested amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), with punishment of 10 years imprisonment in cases of unsafe blood transfusion, and a five-year jail term in cases of adulteration of drugs, and two years jail for adulteration of foods and beverages.

An official of the ICT administration, requesting not to be named, said that once the district administration used to deal with the health institutions, but now all the hospitals, dispensaries and laboratories had been attached with the Ministry of National Health Services so it (HIV) had nothing to do with the district administration.

“In case we got written orders, we will collect the information and submit a consolidated report to the parliamentary committee,” he said.

Programme Manager National Aids Control Programme Dr Baseer Khan Achakzai told Dawn that it seemed someone had provided half-baked information to the respected parliamentarian.

“First of all, it should be made clear that the government of Pakistan does not allocate a single rupee for the HIV and Tuberculosis programmes. Secondly, HIV is not included in general treatment and there are as many as 35 centres across the country where not only treatment is provided to the patients, but the testing facility is also available,” he said.

“Moreover, we provide HIV kits to some community-based organisations to test the people in some segments of the society, such as people who inject drugs, sex workers, transgender, etc,” he said.

Dr Achakzai said that around 50,000 HIV testing kits would be provided to the Sindh government next week.

According to a recent report of USAID, Pakistan is among 11 countries which have the highest prevalence, around 13 per cent, of the disease.

The UNAIDS-2019 analysis revealed that the world was on track to end the Aids epidemic by 2030, but Pakistan is among the countries where ratio of new cases saw a sharp increase. The report termed it a blow to the global efforts to curtail the disease. The federal government had recently requested the WHO and Centre for Disease Control and Prevention to send a rapid response team to investigate the reason of HIV outbreak in Larkana.

Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2019