PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has planned a cholera vaccination campaign to prevent the spread of the acute diarrhoeal infection among flood survivors in the province.

Health officials told Dawn on Saturday that the cholera vaccination plan had been approved and the people would soon begin receiving oral cholera vaccine free of charge.

They said Sindh and Balochistan had already begun vaccinating people in the monsoon disaster-hit areas against cholera but Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was going for it late.

The officials said cholera mostly spread in the displaced people.

They said currently, fewer tests had made it almost impossible to know the exact cholera incidence in the province and steps to be taken accordingly.

Officials say the acute diarrhoeal infection mostly spreads in displaced population

The officials insisted that only the Khyber Medical University was doing quality testing for cholera but it didn’t receive samples in desired numbers from flood-hit districts like Peshawar, Kohat, Malakand and Swat.

They said those districts had recorded around 40 cholera cases in the current year.

The officials said a well-equipped lab at the Saidu Group of Teaching Hospitals, Swat, had yet to begin cholera testing, which was desperately needed after the recent flooding amid fears of the outbreak of water- and food-borne diseases.

They said the World Health Organisation had been providing cholera testing kits but the low testing didn’t show the clear picture of cholera incidence among those, who were living in flood relief camps and had left for homes.

The officials said Pakistan, a member of the United Nations, was required to implement the International Health Regulations, which required cholera vaccination for the entire population.

They said Khyber Pakhtunkhwa required cholera vaccination the way Sindh and Balochistan did it after the emergence of cholera cases.

The officials said the provincial governments were also bound by the IHRs to establish isolation wards, separate bathrooms and other facilities for cholera patients to prevent the disease’s spread.

They said the regional labs established after the outbreak of coronavirus in the province were capable of conducting cholera tests as well.

The officials said 27 per cent of 133,459 people examined in 110 medical camps established by the health department in 19 flood-hit districts had acute watery diarrhea and serious ones should be tested for cholera.

They said they had established a network of teams operating at grassroots level and reporting to the district health officers under the supervision of control room at the directorate general health services.

The officials said public health labs totalling around a dozen could play a significant role in the prevention of diseases through processing samples from their respective districts but they didn’t follow directives issued to them by health department from time to time.

They said the department had been expressing concern about low rate of Covid-19 testing for which those labs were established.

“We also require testing for cholera and other diseases. We need more tests to ascertain the disease volume and start their management and vaccination,” an official told Dawn.

He said Tank and Dera Ismail Khan districts were worst hit by acute watery diarrhea.

Published in Dawn, September 4th, 2022