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WHO appeals for $37m to provide life-saving healthcare Funding shortfall can seriously cripple disease outbreak detection, containment capabilities
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Our correspondent
Islamabad
The World Health Organisation, in collaboration with the Unicef, UNFPA and non-government organisations, has appealed for $37 million to provide life-saving healthcare to IDPs.
The WHO, Unicef, UNFPA and 19 NGOs which form the Health Cluster appealed for immediate funding of $37 million to enable national and international health providers to provide life-saving healthcare to more than 3 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) now residing in temporary camps and in host communities in the country’s northwest.
The request for immediate funding has been articulated in the revised Pakistan Humanitarian Response Plan (PHRP) to provide and manage medicines, comprehensive Primary Health Care services, monitoring of the disease situation, health and hygiene promotion, testing of drinking water supplies and strengthening the secondary and tertiary level healthcare services to avert a humanitarian disaster.
The humanitarian community is facing an unprecedented financial crisis. Of the $543 million requested through the PHRP on May 22, only 22% has been funded. The health sector, so far has received only 11% of the requested amount.
The World Health Organisation (WHO), as the Health Cluster lead, is working closely with the federal, provincial and district authorities in the country to coordinate and deliver health services to those in need.
Among the huge number of displaced people are approximately 500,000 children aged under 5 years and, according to UNFPA, 69,300 pregnant women, 6,000 of whom are expected to deliver within the next month. Nine hundred of these women will require emergency obstetric care to handle pregnancy-related complications.
A total of 61,174 consultations reported to Disease Early Warning System (DEWS) from IDP hosting districts of NWFP for the period of 23 to 29 May.
According to data, the leading causes of medical consultations in the displaced people and hosting community are acute upper respiratory tract infection (23% of the total consultations) and acute diarrhoea (12% in all age groups and 22% of children aged under 5).
The risk of communicable disease outbreaks is of high concern due to overcrowding, contaminated water, poor sanitation and hygienic conditions, low vaccination coverage, poor nutritional status and inadequate provision of healthcare.
So far, 25 outbreaks have been recorded and contained in a timely manner through the Disease Early Warning Systems, but a funding shortfall can seriously cripple timely detection and containment capacities that can lead to an increase in infant and child mortality in the already underserved displaced people.
With the monsoon season fast approaching, concerns are growing about an increase in avoidable sickness and death due to disease outbreaks, such as acute respiratory infection, acute watery diarrhoea, malaria and meningitis. The fragile health status of host communities, as well as the health systems that serve them, are being threatened by the rapid increase in numbers of IDPs and their settlements.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
