The Minister of State for Health, Shehnaz Sheikh has urged the media to provide extensive coverage to immunisation, HIV-AIDS and Primary Health Care programmes. She was addressing the concluding session of a "National Media Retreat on Health" organised by Ministry of Health in collaboration with National Institute of Health (NIH), here on Wednesday.
Dr Asma Bokhari, Programme Manager of National AIDS Control Programme and Dr Qamar Siddiqui spoke on the occasion. Federal Secretary for Health, Anwar Mehmood was also present.
The state minister directed the media to monitor the progress of different health initiatives and provide guidance and feedback for corrective measures.
She said that media could play an important role in mobilising community for creating enabling environment for implementation of HIV-AIDS interventions.
Dr Asma Bokhari, National Programme Manager for National AIDS Control Programme (NACP) said that total cost of the programme is Rs 2,858.422 million. NACP will spend 34 percent of the funds on safer blood transfusion and the component would support establishment of national and provincial "blood transfusion committees", human resources development, quality assurance, monitoring systems development and blood screening for HIV, hepatitis 'B' and 'C'.
She said that objective of the project is to increase services for "sexually transmitted infections" among vulnerable population, improve knowledge and practice of HIV preventive measures including use of high quality services by adult population. She said country has been registered for getting imported medicines, which will be available till April 2005.
According to UN AIDS and WHO country estimates 70,000 to 80,000 people are infected with HIV-AIDS. She said that Hepatitis 'B', 'C' and HIV-AIDS are similar in nature because both are sexually transmitted diseases.
She said that Pakistan is low prevalence of HIV but has high risk due to number of "high risk behaviours" and related factors. Total number of HIV-AIDS cases are 2,612, out of which 2,308 are HIV positive.
Dr Asma said that key risk factors of the highly communicable disease are low literacy rates, silence and denial, high poverty level, low budgetary allocations on health and high prevalence of risky behaviour, large number of internal and external migrant, high proportion of adolescents and young adults and gender inequalities.
She said that in Larkana district HIV epidemic ratio has increased from 0.07 (in 2003) to 6.7 (in May 2004) due to injecting drug users, which is threatening. In rural areas ratio is higher than urban areas because of unawareness among the population, she added.
Dr Asma said that the main focus for averting the epidemic in current epidemiological scenario would be concentrated on working with vulnerable groups for disease prevention, promotion of safer practices.
She further informed that ministry has closed 'nine blood banks' in Sindh because these centres were not fulfilling the criteria for safe blood transmission.