Parents nervously watch as their children wait to be tested for HIV in a village in southern Pakistan, where hundreds of people have been allegedly infected by a doctor using a contaminated syringe.
Dispatched to keep order, police scan the anxious crowd as families hustle into one of five different screening rooms set up in the past month in the village of Wasayo.
Health officials said that more than 400 people, many of them children, have tested HIV-positive in the past few weeks, as experts warn of a surge in infection rates across Pakistan due to the use of unsanitary equipment and rampant malpractice.
Photo: AFP
Anger and fear continue to swell in the poor village hit hard by the epidemic.
“They are coming by the dozens,” said a doctor at the makeshift clinic, beset by a lack of equipment and personnel.
Nisar Ahmed arrived at the clinic in a furious search for medicine after his one-year-old daughter tested positive three days earlier.
“I curse [the doctor] who has caused all these children to be infected,” he said.
Others worry their children’s futures have been irreparably harmed after contracting HIV, especially in a nation where masses of rural poor have little understanding of the disease or access to treatment.
“Who is she going to play with? And when she’s grown up, who would want to marry her?” asked a mother from a nearby village of her four-year-old daughter who just tested positive.
Pakistan was long considered a low prevalence country for HIV, but the disease is expanding at an alarming rate, particularly among intravenous drug users and sex workers.
With about 20,000 new HIV infections reported in 2017 alone, Pakistan has the second-fastest growing HIV rate in Asia, the UN said.
Pakistan’s surging population also suffers the additional burden of having insufficient access to quality healthcare following decades of underinvestment.
“According to some government reports, around 600,000 quack doctors are operating across the country and around 270,000 are practicing in the province of Sindh,” the Joint UN Programme on HIV and AIDS said in a statement.
Provincial health officials have also said that patients are at particular risk of contracting diseases or viruses at these clinics, where injections are often pushed as a primary treatment option.
“For the sake of saving money, these quacks will inject multiple patients with a single syringe. This could be the main cause of the spread of HIV cases,” said Sikandar Memon, provincial program manager of the Sindh Aids Control Program.
The large number of unqualified doctors along with the “reuse of syringes, unsafe blood transfusions and other unsafe medical practices” have all led to the spike in HIV cases, said Bushra Jamil, an expert on infectious diseases at Aga Khan University.
Authorities investigating the outbreak in Sindh said that the accused doctor has also tested positive for HIV.
From a ramshackle jail cell in the nearby city of Ratodero, he denied the charges and accusations he knowingly injected his patients with the virus, while complaining of being incarcerated with common criminals.
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