PESHAWAR: Chikungunya virus is added to Peshawar’s long-standing battle with dengue, as it brings an entirely new public health threat to the residents. Serious apprehension is created now about the ongoing mismanagement at the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Health Department.
Many places in the city report high fever and severe joint pains symptoms usual of Chikungunya, according to a circular from the Provincial Disease Surveillance and Response Unit. Doctors feel the virus might already have begun circulating in the city.
To fight the chances of the threat, requests have been made by the Directorate of Health to immediately set up control rooms and isolation wards at the district levels, an emergency stock of required medicines, and remove the breeding ground of mosquitoes.
But local sources complain that despite these directions, departmental officials are inactive in their roles, doing nothing but taking pictures and making public declarations on social media instead of taking tangible actions on the ground.
Citizens expressed their grievances by issuing postcards that inform that if timely preventive measures are not taken, Chikungunya may spread as fast and wide as dengue has in recent years. The quite consistent failures in vector-borne diseases have increased the apathy and mistrust among common citizens.
Provincial authorities have ordered the District Health Officer (DHO) Peshawar to do the following because of the outbreak:
Hold daily review meetings,
Ensure effective local follow-up on the advisory of the National Institute of Health (NIH), and
Undertake urgent actions to interrupt the virus transmission.
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Once again, an outbreak of preventable diseases in Peshawar has focused attention on some pretty stark flaws in health infrastructure, crisis management, and accountability, all of which put people in jeopardy and mean an urgent response from the authorities.
