KARACHI: As the Pakistan Medical Association expressed its concern over the increasing incidence of mosquito-borne chikungunya, experts in the nine-member team of the World Health Organisation and the Sindh health ministry surveyed five towns of the city to assess the dangers posed by the virus, officials said on Wednesday.

“Epidemiologists and entomologists in WHO’s team and from our side have visited five towns of the city today and jotted down their findings,” said Dr Mohammed Tofique, the city’s director health while speaking to Dawn.

The teams conducted epidemiological investigations of the chikungunya outbreak at health facilities and neighbourhoods.

The teams visited Orangi, Korangi, Lyari, Bin Qasim and Malir towns falling in five out of six districts of the city. Those areas, the officials said, showed greater incidence of chikungunya during the past few months.

He said a joint report would be compiled on Thursday [today] in which findings of the two sides would be incorporated and would duly be shared with the media.

The officials said the WHO team had arrived on Tuesday with the aim to help the Sindh authorities curb the incidence of chikungunya, which was increasingly spreading in the city.

The officials said they had got reports of some 2,073 ‘suspected’ cases of chikungunya in the city. The number of cases was much higher in reports published in the media.

However, the city’s health authorities sent 239 blood samples of suspected chikungunya to the National Institute of Health, Islamabad, of which 183 were confirmed to have been afflicted with the disease.

“This forms 83 per cent of the samples we sent to the NIH. We could not send all suspected cases, thus we have reason to believe that a good number of those suspected cases were not related to chikungunya,” claimed the top health official in the city.

The officials said a good number of high-grade fever cases were reported as chikungunya without being confirmed. However, they conceded that the situation was disquieting.

The officials said establishing a laboratory in the city would also be discussed on Thursday, as there was none in Sindh.

PMA ‘seriously concerned’

The Pakistan Medical Association Karachi said it was ‘seriously concerned’ over the spread of chikungunya in Karachi.

It said chikungunya was an emerging, epidemic-prone vector-borne disease of considerable significance in the WHO South-East Asia region.

It warranted the provincial and city health authorities to take immediate measures to control and eradicate the disease because the population mostly affected by it was from slums who were already resource-strained and poor.

The PMA expressed its shock over the reports showing use of vaccination vis-a-vis the disease in public health facilities despite the fact that there was no such WHO-approved vaccination available worldwide.

The PMA officials said socioeconomic factors and public health inadequacies facilitated the spread of the infection. Besides, environmental factors and community behaviours played a significant role in chikungunya outbreak.

“The socioeconomic burden of the disease can be devastating in event of any outbreak in such heavily populated neighbourhoods,” said a PMA official.

Chikungunya is a viral disease transmitted to humans by infected mosquitoes. It causes fever and severe joint pain. Other symptoms include headache, nausea, fatigue and rash. The disease shares some clinical signs with dengue.

Published in Dawn, May 4th, 2017