Medics put on alert for Congo fever

LAHORE

Adviser to Chief Minister Punjab on Health Kh Salman Rafique has constituted a special team consisting of senior clinicians of Health Department after surfacing of Congo virus in Bahawalpur.  

The team would furnish its report after examining the situation. All contacts of Congo fever patients are being kept in quarantine. These people would remain under surveillance during the incubating period of Congo virus so as to control spread of the disease. Experts of World Health Organisation (WHO), doctors and epidemiologists have been started taking precautionary measures on the spot.

Kh Salman Rafique presided over an important meeting in this connection on Friday which was attended by Secretary Specialised Healthcare and Medical Education Najam Ahmad Shah, Special Secretary Dr Sajid Mahmood Chauhan, Additional Secretary (Tech) Dr Salman Shahid, Director General Health Dr Mukhtar Hussain Syed and the officers of Communicable Disease Control Programme.

DG Health informed the meeting that a student nurse of DHQ Hospital, Lodhran was admitted in BVH, Bahawalpur with complaint of severe abdominal pain and was operated but she did not survive. After four days, surgeon Dr Saghir who had operated the nurse, was admitted in a private hospital of Karachi with symptoms of hemorrhagic fever which was later diagnosed as Congo fever. After that a house surgeon also developed the same symptoms. 

The meeting was informed that after confirmation of Congo fever in both the doctors, an alert had been issued in district Lodhran and Bahawalpur. The health teams have quarantined all contacts of the student nurse and the doctors. Moreover, medical teams of WHO and Health Department are monitoring the situation and blood samples of the isolated people have been sent to National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad. 

Health Department has advised doctors and nurses to wear Personal Protective Gears (PPG), which are available in hospital in sufficient numbers, during the treatment of Congo virus patients if any. 

Kh Salman Rafique directed the DG Health to be vigilant and keep an eye on the situation. He said the all-out effort should be made to control the disease according to the SOPs of WHO. The Health Department has also approached the Livestock Department authorities and they have been asked to start an immediate campaign to eliminate ticks from the cattle and livestock.

Tevta: Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (Tevta) has finalised five weeks security guard training course.  

The course was finalised after various meetings with the officers of Home Department, Police, Civil Defence, Rescue 1122 and Elite Police Training School.

This course is being launched next month at 20 selected Tevta institutes in Lahore, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Jhelum, Rawalpindi, Attock, Sheikhupura, Faisalabad, Mianwali, Sahiwal, Multan, Sargodha, Bahawalpur, Dera Ghazi Khan and Rahimyar Khan. 

Tevta Chairperson Irfan Qaiser Sheikh, addressing a meeting, said the certificates of the new training course would be issued with the collaboration of Home Department. About 16,000 unemployed youths would be trained as security guards in one year, he said, adding that Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif had directed Tevta and Home Department to provide trained security personnel to the security agencies.  

Irfan Qaiser Sheikh said the youth should get training in this sector as trained manpower was widely required at the national and international level, especially in the Gulf State.

He said many multinational organisations were demanding trained security guards from Tevta . The youths after passing the training course would definitely get job in Pakistan and abroad, he added. 

The meeting was attended by Tevta officers, including Akhter Abbas Bharwana, Amir Aziz, Azhar Iqbal Shad and others.

internship: Almost 234 students of 30 universities of Pakistan have completed their internship programme successfully at National Transmission and Despatch Company Limited (NTDC) started six weeks earlier as an initiative of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). 

A certificate and stipend distribution ceremony was held here at Wapda House, Friday. Chief guest of the ceremony, MD NTDC Dr Fiaz Ahmad Chaudhry congratulated the students on successful completion of internship and said their parents and teachers equally deserved congratulations since they had invested time and money on them. 

He said country was facing lot of challenges, including power outages, owing to increasing demand of electricity. He advised the students to follow the pursuit of excellence and always go for the better and best, take the life as a challenge and serve the nation by meeting the changing technology trends in power sector. 

He asked them to payback the country by utilising best of their abilities, which can only be done through self-accountability of every second they spend. He also shared his expertise and experiences while working abroad in various power sector projects in multinational companies and said it was his dream to serve and payback to Pakistan.

NTDC internship programme is one of the biggest programme where students from Engineering, Accounts & Finance, Information Technology and Human Resource disciplines learn and flourish their technical and managerial skills from its experienced manpower of versatile departments.

A written exam was conducted, wherein Mr Burhan Ahmad of UET, Tayyaba of LCWU, Subata Khrushid of Kinnaird College, and Umar Sajjad of University of Sargodha stood first in their disciplines respectively.

Later, MD NTDC Dr Fiaz A Chaudhry gave away the certificates along with stipend to the students. General managers, chief engineers, finance director, DG HR & Admn, directors and officials of NTDC were also present on the occasion.