PESHAWAR, July 13: Despite huge allocations to providing free of cost treatment to the hepatitis patients in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the authorities failed to run a successful awareness campaign for the patients to avail the facility, doctors said.

The provincial government had approved Rs500 million for the treatment of hepatitis C patients, of which Rs203 million was released for 2010 and Rs297 million for the current year, but the health department has been facing an uphill task to register the patients for free treatment.

Officials said that an estimated 5-7 per cent population in the province had hepatitis C and 3-5 suffered from B-type of the disease. They said that 12,815 patients had been provided treatment during the past two years while 16,000 were still waiting to get free medication. Of them, 8,000 were registered in Peshawar and 8,000 in other districts.

“Medicines have already been purchased for the 16,000 patients, but a mechanism is needed to issue the drugs to the patients,” the officials said. They said that these medicines were lying in the cold storage of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) of the health department because the five cold storages owned by the Provincial Hepatitis Control Programme were out of order from the past four years.

About 1,000 interferon injections meant to be given free of cost to the hepatitis C patients had been stored in the federal government's EPI store while the patients are waiting to be administered these injection.

The government runs three programmes simultaneously to give free treatment to hepatitis patients in the province, but the slow-paced approach by the authorities concerned have left the patients unaware of these programmes. Still majority of the people didn't know about free treatment by the government, said officials at the health directorate.

“Even the department is not taking interest to start free investigation facilities despite buying costly equipment for an important polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test due to which the would-be beneficiaries have been kept waiting,” the officials said. The new machines purchased for Mardan, Dera Ismail Khan, Kohat, Swat, Bannu, Abbottabad and Peshawar are yet to be made operational to benefit the patients, the officials said. According to the plan, the health department wants to register the Zakat-deserving patients across the province for free treatment, but this it needs to start registration of the patients as soon as possible and avoid lapsing of the amount, they said.

The government has also planned to provide free diagnostic and treatment facilities to 70,000 hepatitis C patients at the sentinel sites in the district headquarters hospitals in every district and four hospitals of Peshawar, including Khyber Teaching Hospital, Lady Reading Hospital, City Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex.

Some of the hospitals, the officials said, were opposing awareness campaigns, arguing that the patients would come in droves and it would not be possible to handle them. “It is ridiculous because every hospital has to implement the government policy and programmes,” said other officials, adding that the government should immediately begin an awareness campaign to inform the people about the causative and preventive measures besides informing the people that free treatment was available at the district headquarters hospitals of every district.