LAHORE, Jan 1: A four-year-old boy was shifted to Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Children Hospital on Tuesday due to life-threatening complications caused by diphtheria.

The treating doctors and hospital administration ran into trouble when they found that the available lifesaving drug anti-diphtheria serum expired on Dec 31.

The rarely available and costly drug is said to be the only remedy and crucial for the survival of people suffering from the infectious disease, which is common among children under 5. The drug is only manufactured at the Serum Institute of India and is currently not available in any part of the country, a senior official of the health department told Dawn on condition of anonymity.

The first diphtheria case of 2013 surfaced in Al-Hafiz Town of Sabzazar in the provincial capital on Tuesday when Haider Ali took his son Mustafa to Children Hospital. Mustafa’s condition deteriorated when he stopped breathing due to swollen neck glands.

This is the 5th diphtheria case in Punjab during the last two days. Four children of a family were diagnosed with diphtheria in Faisalabad on Monday.

The anti-diphtheria serum was provided to the health department by the World Health Organization (WHO) after the infectious disease claimed lives of six children during last couple of months. More than 20 such cases were reported in Punjab during this time.“We had the stock of anti-diphtheria serum vials only for 22 children,” the official said. As the cases continued to rise in various districts of the province, the WHO-provided drug was distributed to health facilities to prevent more deaths, he said.

Of the available stock, the official said, the drug was administered to four children from Faisalabad on Dec 31 and their lives were saved. He said the Children Hospital administration alerted the health department on Tuesday when it found that the drug had expired and Mustafa’s condition continued to deteriorate in the absence of the lifesaving treatment.

“Now we have five dozes of the expired drug in the store,” the official said and added that doctors were reluctant to give expired drug to Mustafa because of fear of reaction. Consequently, he was shifted to ICU and chances of his survival were bleak if he was not given the anti-diphtheria serum immediately.

The official says diphtheria spreads quickly and mainly affects nose and throat. “Children under 5 are highly at risk of contracting the infection,” he said. He said as diphtheria was a rare infectious disease in the USA and Europe and common in developing countries, its medicine was rarely available and only India was manufacturing it to fight the disease all over the world.

The drug’s shelf life is short and this is one of the reasons for its shortage in the market. According to the preliminary investigations launched shortly after emergence of diphtheria cases in Faisalabad and Lahore, the official said Mustafa and four other children had not been vaccinated during routine immunisation campaigns.