PESHAWAR, Nov 15: The health department is yet to initiate effective measures to deal with the incidence of dengue as the number of suspected cases in the province reached 25, sources said.

Sources said that a meeting held under the additional chief secretary on Oct 28, had decided that insecticides would be sprayed in high-risk districts and diagnostic centres would be set up in all district-level hospitals.

The meeting had also decided to allocate Rs5 million for purchasing the requisite equipment for hospitals and insecticides. So far, no practical step had been taken to materialise the meeting’s decisions.

The meeting was participated by administrative secretaries, representatives of UN agencies and other experts.

Officials said that of the total dengue patients in the NWFP, only five had been confirmed while only one patient had died of the viral fever. Others, they said, had either been sent home or were being managed in the tertiary-care hospitals.

Sources said that the latest case was reported from district headquarters hospital in Abbottabad where a 22-year-old man on Oct 16.

His blood sample was sent to Karachi where he was positively diagnosed to be suffering from dengue fever.

"The government is claiming to have established centres in district level hospitals to manage suspected dengue fever patients, but no such facilities exist," said sources, adding that there was no such facility even at the tertiary-care hospitals.

Doctors, they said, were unable to collect the blood sample for sending them to the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Islamabad.

According to them, the WHO had trained some health workers at the teaching hospitals about diagnosis techniques and management of dengue fever patient but despite that patients waited for days for just the test because of non-availability of experts.

Sources said that the health department had even not prepared a plan for the release of the allocated money.

Sources said that the summer season was almost over in the NWFP and there was no need to spray insecticides because mosquitoes would disappear in the cold season.

Meanwhile, the provincial health department had asked the World Health Organisation (WHO) to train doctors working in teaching and district headquarter hospitals.

According to official, the WHO had agreed to train 72 doctors from 24 DHQs and 16 from the teaching hospitals.

Furthermore, the WHO officials said that 16 doctors from health facilities in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas would also be trained in Peshawar.