Two children have lost their lives and a dozen others have tested positive for HIV at the Sindh Employees Social Security Institution’s (Sessi) Valika Hospital in Karachi’s SITE Area, officials confirmed on Sunday, in what appears to be a fresh outbreak of the virus among children.
Hospital officials said that 14 children from Pathan Colony have been confirmed to be HIV-positive after they were brought to the paediatrics ward with persistent fever, infections and unexplained weight loss.
The parents of all the infected children have tested negative for HIV, which have raised serious concerns over how the virus was transmitted to the minors. With no HIV treatment facility at the Valika Hospital, the affected children have now been referred to Dr Ruth KM Pfau Civil Hospital Karachi and other health facilities treating HIV patients in the city.
The sudden deaths of two of the infected children has triggered panic among parents and locals. Hospital officials said that the initial findings point towards unsafe medical practices in the community.
They blamed unqualified healthcare providers, and poor infection prevention and control practices, either within the community or by private healthcare providers, as the likely cause of the outbreak. Locals, however, accused the Valika Hospital of negligence and held the facility responsible for the spread.
Residents and community leaders from Pathan Colony demanded that a large-scale HIV screening drive, similar to the Ratodero screening campaign, be launched immediately across SITE Town to identify more possible cases and prevent further transmission. They said that given the vulnerability of the locality’s children, delaying the screening would be “criminal negligence”.
In response to the growing outcry, the Valika Hospital medical superintendent has set up a committee to conduct an internal inquiry into the outbreak and determine if lapses at the hospital contributed to the transmission of HIV among the children.
The crisis was also taken up during a high-level meeting, led by Labour Action Committee Chairman Malik Nek Zada Swati, in which the participants criticised the administration and demanded swift action.
They urged the Sindh labour minister and the Sessi commissioner to initiate legal action against those responsible, warning that if the authorities fail to act, they would pursue legal options themselves.
Public health experts said that this is yet another example of the failure of Sindh’s HIV prevention and control programme, which continues to downplay or hide outbreaks instead of taking preventive measures.
Sindh remains the worst-affected province in Pakistan, with nearly 4,000 children now living with HIV. Around 2,300 new HIV infections have already been reported in the province in the first nine months of this year alone.
Officials said that repeated outbreaks among children in Larkana, Shikarpur, Ratodero and now Karachi expose the gaps in surveillance, unsafe medical practices and weak oversight of healthcare services, especially in low-income neighbourhoods. Hushing up HIV numbers instead of confronting the crisis has allowed infections to spread unchecked across Sindh, they added.
