Chief Executive of Health Foundation Pakistan Saeed Allahwala has said that no money is enough to help the poverty-stricken masses of Pakistan in order to provide them with better health facilities. This he said while addressing a fund raising ceremony for the patients of hepatitis, which was organised by Health Foundation at a local hotel on Saturday.
He said that now the time has come to join hands to combat this deadly disease and for this purpose we should help the patients of hepatitis, who can not afford the expenses of treatment.
He said that the Health Foundation is working for a noble cause to control the spread of hepatitis and bring down the increasing number of hepatitis patients. Every five out of 100 has been suffering due to hepatitis in Pakistan, he said. Dr Saad Khalid Niaz, has said that prevention is better than treatment. He said that the recent survey shows that the prevalent rate of Hepatitis C in Pakistan is 4.9 percent and the prevalent rate of Hepatitis B is 2.5 percent.
He said that the government of Pakistan has taken steps to reduce the growing numbers of hepatitis patients through different information campaigns and vaccination due to which the prevalence rate of Hepatitis B fell down from 2.9 percent per year to 2.5 percent.
He said that the government's information campaign through media is not sufficient because most of the people do not know about this deadly disease due to which the mortality rate has been increasing each passing day. He said that it spread through transfusion of blood, use of infected blood products, re-use of syringes and by using infected instruments. The medical sector should avoid use of infected instrument in order to control hepatitis, he urged.
He said that those people who are most at risk for developing viral hepatitis are workers in the health care professions, people with multiple sexual partners, intravenous drug users, and haemophiliacs who receive blood-clotting factors. He said that the period of time between exposure to hepatitis and the onset of the illness is called the incubation period. He said that the incubation period varies depending on the specific hepatitis virus. Hepatitis A has an incubation period of about 15-45 days, hepatitis B from 45-160 days and hepatitis C from 2 weeks to 6 months, he said.
He said that many patients infected with hepatitis A, B, and C have few or no symptoms of illness. For those who do develop symptoms of viral hepatitis, the most common are flu-like symptoms including loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, fever, weakness, tiredness and aching in the abdomen, he explained. He said that most of the hepatitis patients die due to lack of medical facilities at the hospitals and also due to costly treatment. He said that the cost of treatment of Hepatitis C may vary from 45,000 to 60,000 per month, which is unaffordable.
He said that Pakistan is a developing country and like other developing countries, it is also facing problems in health sector. He said that declining economy of the country forced the policy makers to reduce the budget of health sector for the fiscal year 2008-09. The government has fixed Rs11 billion for health in fiscal year 2008-09. He said that the Health Foundation is working on three projects: awareness, prevention and treatment. The foundation has the aim to inform every citizen about this deadly disease in detail so as to protect maximum number of people from hepatitis.
He said that 70 percent of Pakistani population comes below poverty line due to which they can not even think about treatment. For this purpose the Health Foundation has decided to divide half of its assets to run an awareness campaign and half for the treatment of deserving people. He said that the foundation has a target to treat 10,000 patients of hepatitis and 50,000 children would be vaccinated in next year. He said that it is huge project and for this there is a dire need that people from different walk of life join hands together to help us to achieve our target.