PESHAWAR, June 27: Incidence of leishmaniasis (a skin disease) in Kurram Agency are under control but there is a need to create public awareness and launch treatment programmes to check its spread.
This was stated by WHO’s emergency medical officer Dr Quaid Saeed while talking to Dawn.
He said the influx of Afghan refugees in the area was the main reason behind outbreak of disease among the local population.
Leishmaniasis produces skin lesions mainly on the face, arms and legs. Although, this form is often self-healing, it can create serious disability and permanent scars.
The WHO official said the disease had been prevalent in Afghanistan for centuries, as the country was situated on the cutaneous leishmaniasis belt in Asia.
He said due to prolonged war in Afghanistan, millions of Afghan people left their home and took refuge in different parts of the NWFP. As Kurram Agency borders Afghanistan, about 150,000 Afghan refugees made their permanent abode there and were considered as main source of transmission of the disease.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has also reported 4,601 cases in the refugee camps.
In November 2001, a government health official reported an outbreak of leishmaniasis in the lower Kurram Agency, stating that 221 cases were detected in village Mahoora alone.
In December 2001, the health department sought the help of the WHO, which constituted nine teams which carried out a three-day survey. The survey revealed that each house had an average 2.2 people inflicted by the disease.
During the survey, a total of 1,027 cases were reported with 71 per cent found to have contracted the disease in one year’s time which suggested an impending epidemic in the region. Children, specially girls in the age of 1-5 years, were found to be common victims.
The people were unaware of the disease and had not taken any measures to control the spread of the disease.
The WHO invited Dr Desjeux Philippe, a Geneva-based expert on the disease, who visited the agency in January 2002, and suggested treatment of at least 5,000 cases immediately.
He also made it clear that the problem was not restricted to Lower Kurram because of the huge influx of the refugees from Afghanistan to other parts of the agency. Local population complained that no insecticide spray had been carried out in the last three years to control the spread of disease.
A health official warned that the skin disease could assume alarming proportions in settled areas of the province, like Kurram Agency, if measures were not adopted to control it.