KARACHI, June 3: A centre meant for counselling and screening of pregnant women against HIV/Aids established at the Civil Hospital Karachi has been shifted to Qatar Hospital in Orangi Town as administration of the former hospital failed to spare adequate space for it, said sources privy to Aids prevention activities.
The only centre of its kind in the province was commissioned at the centrally located CHK about seven months back, with the collaboration and technical assistance of the Unicef.
Sindh Health Minister Dr Saghir Ahmad only on Saturday last performed the inauguration of the Prevention of Parents To Child Transmission (PPTCT) Centre, which had already screened about 60 pregnant women coming from its surrounding areas since May 12, claimed a source, adding that none of the pregnant women had been found positive for HIV/Aids since then.
The fifth PPTCT in the country-the CHK centre-stopped functioning in the early months of 2008 as one of the project partner did not find it viable to maintain its support. The reason given for the scrapping of the CHK centre was that under a memorandum of understanding the hospital administration had agreed to provide space/rooms in its gynaecology/obstetric department, but it failed to meet this commitment due to inaptitude of some senior officials.
CHK sources said that a couple of medical practitioners, who were believed to have political connections, resisted the allocation of a room to the centre because it would have compelled them to surrender their own temporary or additional accommodation in the gynaecology OPD. Sadly, neither the medical superintendent, the board of governors of the civil hospital nor any health department officials concerned could effectively addressed the situation.
Focus on newborns
The PPTCT centres work towards minimising the risk of a newborn being HIV-positive. Under the programme, pregnant women visiting health care centres are counselled and asked to consent to an HIV test. If they test positive and prefer to carry the pregnancy through to its full term, they are provided drugs to minimise the chance of the virus being transmitted to the infant.
The centre attended 220 pregnant women in 2007. Of them 202 women consented to be tested for HIV, while one of them was found positive to the deadly virus.
Such centres help prevent unintended pregnancies in HIV-positive women and spread awareness about the risks of and safeguards against the deadly virus.
Sources privy to the HIV/Aids care activities apprehend that Qatar Hospital would not be able to attract women from as many parts of the city as the CHK had. The centre could have served a large number of women population from across the city had the representatives of the donor agencies and the officials of the Sindh health department moved accordingly in the beginning of the problem.
However, officials active in the re-commissioning of the PPTCT at Qatar Hospital maintained that since the hospital in question had already got an STI centre and a surveillance centre for patient with HIV/Aids within its limit it was selected for the establishment of the centre, where an experienced doctor appointed by the Unicef had also been made available.
It was learnt that a woman patient of Aids, who was kept on ART under the Sindh Aids Control Programme, has safely delivered a baby at Qatar hospital in recent days.
Funds allocation
Talking of the alleged indifferent attitude of the relevant bureaucracy in the Sindh health department, an Aids worker said that hardly 45 per cent of the allocated funds for various Aids projects had been released or utilised during the last eleven months of the ongoing fiscal year. Files were not cleared in time and consequently a number of projects could not be launched at all, while another couple of projects meant for sensitization of jail inmates and female sex workers and relevant follow-ups had to be given a break.
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