KARACHI, Aug 4: As the city received its first monsoon downpour on Saturday, the authorities admitted that they had done insufficient homework to keep dangerous dengue germs at bay especially when it was feared to attack once the season signed off and pools of water remained to provide them lethal breeding-grounds.

“We have not done anything satisfactory to stave off the danger of dengue with the culmination of monsoon and cannot rule out the possibility of more loss of human lives this year,” said a senior official in the provincial health department while speaking to Dawn.

While not sparing his department for making little efforts to save people from dengue, which gets lethal historically after every three years, which this year happens to be, the official said that the officials in the civic agencies were not proficient either.

“We have held dozens of meetings and decided to take several actions to keep the lethal germs in check, but have done far little whenever it comes to taking action,” he said.

Sources said that apart from other actions, a focal group comprising six departments and civic agencies, failed to take rounds of the shops that repaired punctured tyres to ensure that they regularly change water in their tubs and duly wrap the stock tyres.

Such tyres are considered to be ideal breeding-ground for mosquito as it shipped to Pakistan in consignments of tyres a couple of decades ago.

Some non-governmental organisations had launched a campaign against the imported tyres a couple of years ago on the plea that the large-sized tyres in particular had been shipped unwrapped after being kept in warehouses for long time, thus, they were carriers of the mosquito as well apart from offering it a perfect place to grow.

Recently, the Punjab government has launched a campaign across the province against the tyre selling and repairing shops.

The authorities have seized hundreds of unwrapped tyres and sealed shops and fined the errant owners.

“The authorities in Punjab have learnt a lesson from their worst experience last year and are taking efficacious measures, but we have failed to learn a lesson despite thousands of dengue cases and loss of several lives since 2005,” said another official.

He admitted that so far negligible visits had been made to the tyre selling and repair shops with no follow-up in sight. “As a matter of fact, trivial efforts have been made in this regard. During those fewer visits to such shops the officials took no pain to check whether the tyres are properly wrapped, instead they directed the owners to pack them and the puncture menders to change water in their tubs regularly and returned,” said the official.

He said that the mosquito larvae were bound to be hatched in innumerable breeding grounds that could pose a grave threat to human populations.

Sources in the industry say that just 45 per cent of the demand for car tyres is produced locally; the rest is either imported or smuggled.

Pakistan just produces 16 per cent of light truck tyres and the rest is imported or smuggled while just four per cent of tyres for buses and trucks are produced locally.

Sources said that locally manufactured tyres were produced on demand by car manufacturers, thus they were seldom stockpiled as did the ones coming from abroad.

The sources in the municipal agencies said that because of uncertainty and provincial government’s row with the municipal authorities over the share in property tax, etc, several health-related and sanitation services had been affected.

The city is seen with the piles of garbage dotted across its residential and commercial areas, which, experts fear, could create a health epidemic because of viral and communicable diseases as monsoon has already started and greater downpours are expected to continue.

The situation could become worse as the weather forecast has warned that Karachi can receive 15 per cent more rainfall than it gets on average during monsoons. Besides, the lack of effective vector control service has given rise to breeding grounds for mosquito that could make dengue and malaria more lethal.

According to the World Health Organisation, dengue is the world’s fastest-spreading tropical disease and represents a “pandemic threat” infecting an estimated 50 to 100 million dengue infections worldwide every year across the globe and 2.5 billion people are at risk from the disease.

Transmitted by the bite of female mosquitoes, the disease is occurring more widely due to increased movement of people and goods — including carrier objects such as bamboo plants and used tyres — as well as floods linked to climate change.

Officials said monsoon rains could play havoc because of absence of essential municipal services in the country’s largest city. The messy solid waste management could spawn oodles of infectious diseases while defective drainage system could provide lots of breeding grounds to mosquito to attack on more people and inflict dengue and malaria, etc. A three-week vector control campaign by the KMC, which is scheduled to come to an end on Monday, remained more rhetorical and less effective as complaints pouring in from across the city suggested its fumigation staffs never reached out to the target areas.

Last year, more than 700 cases of dengue fever were reported out of which four people died, including a woman.

In 2011, 858 dengue cases and 16 related deaths had been reported from Karachi.