450,000 people fall prey to TB every year, Senate body told

ISLAMABAD: The Senate’s functional committee on less developed areas was shocked to hear about massively inadequate healthcare for the spreading deadly Aids and tuberculosis (TB), as number of AIDS patients stood at 94,000 and 450,000 were falling prey to TB annually.

The panel met here at the Parliament House under the chairmanship of Senator Usman Kakar to have a review of the performance of the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination and its attached departments.

Senators were taken aback when the ministry officials and representatives of various attached departments shared details about health issues and allocation of insufficient funds for their treatment and prevention. The forum was informed that in 2014, as many as 16 babies were born with Aids. However, no such cases were traced during 2015. Punjab tops the list of patients having the deadly disease with 52,000 persons, followed by Sindh with 21,000, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with 4,700 and Balochistan with 14.

In all, there are over 94,000 registered and unregistered Aids patients across Pakistan and majority of them use narcotics and other drugs. Of these, 14,579 patients can be treated and cured while already 7,537 have been treated. There are just 20 clinics for treating and handling the disease. The committee members laid emphasis on various awareness campaigns about the life-taking ailment and allocation of sufficient funds to treat it.

TB, the panel was informed, was also a major challenge to deal with, as every year, 450,000 people were falling prey to it while 13,000 suffer from acute ailment, which is difficult to treat with medicines.

It was also quite surprising for the committee members that after 2001, the incumbent government had allocated funds for the ailment and out of Rs50 million, salaries were being paid to the department employees and utility bills cleared. About 70 percent medicines are provided by the donors.

For the next three years, Rs12 billion had been allocated. There are 1,500 laboratories in Pakistan, where tests are done free of cost and there are 5,000 treatment centres as well.

The ruling PML-N Senator Nisar Muhammad lauded the Prime Minister’s National Health Programme as a gift for the poor people and proposed that it should focus initially on treatment of victims of APS tragedy and people of Fata, where there is hardly any concept of healthcare. He also suggested provision of free transport to people of far-flung areas to get treated at big hospitals, as on their own, they can’t afford it.

He expressed concern over the fact that Rs2,700 billion had been allocated under the PSDP, but there was no health project included in it, emphasising saving of life and protection of health of citizens was the responsibility of the state.

The committee chairman proposed that the CNICs of parents, who refuse their children being administered polio drops, should be blocked. He said there was no facility of malaria test at government hospitals, therefore, people had to pay to private laboratories for tests.  The committee called for a more coordinated efforts at national level to ensure Pakistan comes out of the poliovirus stigma.

A director from Fata revealed that health staff was being denied salaries, as the ministry had stopped funds for the last one year. The PTI Senator Samina Abid said that patients in Chitral, Mansehra and elsewhere did not often visit the government-run facilities, as there were neither medicines nor other healthcare gadgets available.