‘Dengue will continue to haunt Pakistan for many years’

Lack of comprehensive national plan cited as a cause for spread of virus.

ISLAMABAD: The lethal dengue virus might be dormant at times but it will strike back.

In a startling revelation, against all hopes, the chief of the Dengue Eradication Programme warned that the deadly virus will continue to haunt Pakistan for several more years to come.

Dr Muhammad Najeeb Durrani told The Express Tribune that the reason behind this was a lack of a comprehensive national plan of action against the virus.

“It is hard to eradicate this epidemic from Pakistan completely at least for the time being,” Dr Durrani said, who is handling the fatal syndrome since 2003 in different parts of the country.

Dr Durrani said that the federal government is trying to devise a comprehensive modus operandi to meet this challenge, but till then, it remains a major challenge facing Pakistan.

He said that top bureaucrats, including the Islamabad’s secretary administration and development, are working on devising a comprehensive strategy and are holding deliberations every day for the last three months to the same end.

However, he added that the current strategy was to take effective measures for prevention, control and containment of the fever whose very first case was reported in 1994 in Lasbela district of Balochistan.

According to an official estimate, the death toll in Punjab has reached 350 with over 300 cases reported from Lahore alone, during the recent outbreak of the virus.

“There were over 20,000 patients who were suspected to be infected in the country in 2011 and over 18,000 cases have been confirmed as the victims of dengue fever,” Dr Durrani said.

He added that the most affected province is Punjab where the number of confirmed cases is about 16,000 with almost 14,000 cases in Lahore alone.

“The actual number of victims is much more than the official figures since they are based only on officially reported cases in government hospitals,’’ he explained.

“Many cases have not been reported as they were treated in private clinics and hospitals.”

In Islamabad alone, five government hospitals reported 624 confirmed cases out of a total of 1,000 suspected patients during the last few months and two patients died in the federal capital during the last few weeks.

Meanwhile, experts from Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia have briefed the government of Punjab that the dengue fever could continue for another 10 years in Pakistan, a provincial minister told The Express Tribune, requesting anonymity.

“Next year it will be more dangerous and fatal since those infected by the dengue fever this year survived with medical care, but will not be able to alive if infected again,” the minister said, quoting foreign experts.

“The victims will suffer from brain fever or hemorrhagic fever if infected again and that will be fatal,” added the minister.

Regarding the actual number of cases, the minister admitted that the government of Punjab has been hiding the actual number of infected people due to scathing criticism by political opponents who have been accusing the provincial government of failure to combat the epidemic.

Back in the day

Following a blood sample examination at a laboratory in South Africa in 2003, it was officially confirmed that a few people were infected with this new breed of a deadly mosquito virus in Haripur, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

Then the virus hit Karachi in 2005 where 4,500 cases of infected people were registered. The epidemic continued to hit a large number of people in Azad Jammu & Kashmir in 2006 but it largely went unreported.

Dr Durrani said as of 2010, dengue fever is believed to have infected 50 to 100 million people worldwide. He said, it has dramatically increased in frequency between 1960 and 2010 by almost 30 fold.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 10^th, 2011.