KARACHI: Officials at the National Institute of Child Health said on Saturday that the condition of the six-year-old child from Larkana, brutally bitten by dogs, was not yet stable and more surgeries would be decided by the panel of doctors taking care of him.

“His condition is not yet out of danger,” said Dr Jamal Raza, executive director of the NICH, while speaking to reporters.

“The child, Hasnain, is still on ventilator.”

Dr Raza said the four-member panel of doctors formed to take care of the child bitten by half-a-dozen dogs in Larkana would soon decide for further surgeries.

The child was operated upon initially on Friday when he was brought to the NICH in a critical condition.

Another senior medic said more surgeries were required to rehabilitate the child. “We’ll perform surgeries with the pace of improvement in the damaged tissues,” he said.

Officials said the child’s head and upper torso were badly damaged, particularly his nose and the back of the skull.

His eyes would be examined in detail once the wounds were satisfactorily healed, said officials. They added that stabilising the child was the first major task for the doctors, as the infection was still extremely dangerous.

Officials said some two dozen deaths because of rabies had been reported across Sindh. The total number of dog-bite cases this year is more than 120,000.

Published in Dawn, November 17th, 2019