ISLAMABAD, March 5: Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Saturday announced launching of Rs2.5 billion national strategy for prevention and control of hepatitis infections that would focus mostly on prevention of the disease among children.

"Hepatitis, which is spreading fast, worries me the most. It and other water borne diseases are threatening lives of our citizens", said the PM while speaking at a symposium at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) here on Saturday.

The strategy on hepatitis is being launched throughout the country to check spread of Hepatitis B and C. It will stress on safe blood transfusion, checking re-use of syringes and proper sterilization of medical equipment both in the public and private hospitals.

Referring to the recently adopted fiscal responsibility law, the prime minister said the law obligated the government to double by 2013 in relation to GDP the budgetary allocations for social sectors like health and education. Health allocations for the federal area had also been scaled up to 42 per cent during the current fiscal year, he said adding that the government was committed to provide social services to the people. He said unhealthy and illiterate nation never progress.

Prime Minister Aziz highlighted the need for focussing equally on preventive, primary, secondary and tertiary levels and said the government had increased allocations on programmes like DOTS (directly observed treatment system), polio immunization and inoculation against hepatitis-B.

About primary health, the prime minister said the government had approved increasing the number of lady health workers from 80,000 to 100,000 to provide primary health care at door step.

On secondary health care, he said the government was minimising the shortage of doctors and para-medics and providing necessary medical facilities to district headquarters hospital (DHQs) in different district to help reduce patient's load on tertiary level hospitals like PIMS.

He highlighted the need for investing more to upgrade nursing quality and said good nurses reduce burden on doctors. Besides, he said, there was a great demand for such nurses both at home and abroad.

The prime minister also talked about quality of medicines and said the entire system of registration of new medicines, quality control and pricing needed complete restructuring.

He said people deserved quality medicines at cheaper rates, adding that importance of generic medicines could not be ignored.

Mr Aziz, however, deplored the fact that maintenance standard of expensive medical equipments in public hospitals was not up to the mark. Medical equipments, he said, should be procured from reputed companies that guarantee complete backup support and maintenance.