A SYRINGE in a public hospital should be among the simplest guarantees of safety. Yet Sindh’s Public Accounts Committee has been told that 38 of 55 companies supplying syringes and drip sets to government hospitals were providing products that failed laboratory standards. When products from so many approved suppliers fail testing, scrutiny cannot stop with the manufacturers; it must extend to the procurement and quality-control systems that allowed these goods into hospitals. FIRs have been registered, but prosecution cannot be the end of the matter. The government must immediately identify the companies and affected batches, quarantine or recall suspect stocks, order independent retesting, and audit the tenders, laboratories and officials involved in clearing them. It must also establish what ‘substandard’ meant in each case and make those findings public. Complaints of syringe reuse require a parallel investigation. The two issues should not be conflated without evidence, but together they expose serious weaknesses in the chain meant to protect patients from procurement to disposal.

Sindh has been warned before — repeatedly. In Ratodero in 2019, WHO identified unsafe medical injections and poor infection control among the risk factors in an HIV outbreak in which hundreds of children tested positive. Pakistan has since recorded child-centred HIV outbreaks in Jacobabad and Shikarpur, Mirpurkhas and Taunsa, and several districts in 2025. WHO and UNAIDS have linked such episodes to unsafe injections and blood transfusions. Only recently, amid another paediatric HIV crisis at Karachi’s Valika Hospital, inspectors found needles removed from used syringes without proper sharps disposal, weak waste segregation and inadequate infection-control training. And HIV is not the only danger. WHO estimates Pakistan has the world’s heaviest hepatitis C burden, with unsafe injections and blood practices contributing to transmission. Sindh already has a law regulating disposable syringes. What it lacks is credible enforcement. The province needs safety engineered single-use syringes, batch-level traceability, rigorous waste disposal, unannounced infection-control inspections and strong penalties for suppliers, hospitals and officials who cut corners. These safeguards should be routine rather than measures adopted after another failure is exposed. Patients enter hospitals seeking treatment; no health system can tolerate becoming a source of the disease it is meant to prevent.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2026