LARKANA, Nov 22: Speakers at a seminar titled ‘Advancing injection safety’ held at Chandka Medical College on Saturday proposed early legislation to discourage the growing trend of multiple use of syringe.

Professor Surgeon Sikandar Shaikh the principal of Chandka Medical College, was the chief guest.

He stressed the need of putting in individual efforts to fight against the menace of what he called the ‘reuse’ of syringe in hospitals and private clinics, as this practice would decrease the evidence of Hepatitis B, C and HIV and AIDS.

He urged the media to play its role in creating awareness against the reuse of the syringes and holding frequent seminars to involve the public.

Dr Aijaz Memon, Dr Faisal Shaikh, Dr Parvez Abbasi, Dr Zakir Hussain and other speakers said that approximately 0.21 million people are inflicted with Hepatitis B, while 2million with Hepatitis C and 0.2 million were hit by HIV / AIDS annually in the world. The key reason being the use of recycled syringe, they maintained.

Talking about the current situation of HIV / AIDS in Pakistan, they said the first case was detected in 1987 in Karachi and now total number of HIV/AIDS patients was 3,073. Of them 2,741 are the HIV positive cases while only 332 cases were that of AIDS and Sindh had 40 per cent of the reported HIV/AIDS cases, they said.

In Larkana district the total number of the registered cases of HIV/AIDS was 165 and out of them 61 per cent patients are the intravenous drug users while 20 per cent were blood donors.

They called for effective arrangements for the safer disposal of hospital waste and the installation of incinerators to burn the hospital waste like gloves and syringes.