What is being done?

 

What is being done?

The Sindh High Court has given the provincial government until July 20 to respond to a petition alleging violations of provincial laws governing the regulation and disposal of syringes.

A Pakistani doctor screens villagers for HIV at a hospital in a village near Ratodero, a small town in the southern province of Sindh, Pakistan, in May 2019, where the outbreak of the deadly disease took place earlier in the year [File: Fareed Khan/AP Photo]

At the federal level, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered a nationwide ban on substandard syringes on July 3.

The Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan later announced that retail sales of conventional syringes that can be reused, unlike auto-disable syringes that block or break the plunger after one use, will be banned from January 2027.

Federal Health Minister Mustafa Kamal has also said HIV screening will become mandatory before surgery nationwide, while cautioning against describing the situation as a broader “epidemic”.

Meanwhile, the Sindh government has approved a 2 billion-rupee ($7.2m) endowment fund for the long-term care of affected children, alongside an isolation ward and a third-party audit of KBV Hospital’s procurement and infection control systems after the provincial ombudsman took notice of the case.

Al Jazeera contacted Sindh Health Department officials for comment but did not receive a response.

Mahmood, however, said measures such as banning syringes address only part of the problem.

About 60 percent of healthcare in Pakistan is delivered by the private sector, which he said is much harder to regulate.

“The private sector is considerably more difficult to regulate. It encompasses not just hospitals but also clinics, dispensaries and similar facilities, which are nominally overseen by healthcare commissions that simply do not have the manpower to inspect all of them,” he said.

Mahmood said unsafe injections remain deeply embedded in Pakistan’s healthcare culture, driven not only by weak regulation but also by patient expectations.

“Patients coming to a doctor expect an injection because they believe it will make them recover faster, and healthcare workers often feel the same way,” he said. “It is, in many ways, a perfect storm: more injections being given, those injections going largely unregulated, limited knowledge of safe injection practice, no surveillance on whether injections are being administered correctly, and no consequences for unsafe practice.”