KARACHI: Sindh health authorities on Thursday announced five more deaths in the province — four in Karachi and one in Tando Allahyar — as it formally lifted the ‘heatwave emergency’ it had imposed earlier. All available resources were put forward to deal with the heatwave which killed 1,271 alone in the metropolis since June 20, when the first heatstroke victims arrived at hospitals.

“The heatwave has finally waned as has been suggested by the improved weather and the reports we have received from the Met office,” said a senior official in the provincial health department while speaking to Dawn.

“And now when the number of victims has reduced to the minimal we have formally lifted the emergency that had been imposed when the situation was critical,” he added.

He said with four more deaths at Karachi’s Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) the city’s death toll rose to 1,271 while 102 people died in other districts of the province.

All additional facilities, he said, which included heatstroke centres, camps and makeshift facilities were being wrapped up.

“All hospitals in Sindh, including Karachi, have returned to their normal mode and staff which had earlier been diverted to work in dedicated facilities for heatstroke victims are back to their original postings,” said the official.

Dr Seemin Jamali, joint executive director of the JPMC, while speaking to Dawn said, “We are still receiving heatstroke patients at our hospital, but they are few in number.”

She said so far 378 heatstroke patients had died at the JPMC, the most recorded by any hospital in the province.

Similarly, officials at the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC), which runs scores of hospitals including the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, and doctors at the Civil Hospital Karachi said they were wrapping up their extra facilities, which they had set up to treat heatstroke patients and the few patients who were still coming in were being taken care of at their routine emergency departments.

The figures received by authorities show that the victims were not just drug addicts, beggars and homeless persons, but a significant number of them hailed from low-income groups living in ghetto-like impoverished neighbourhoods of the city.

About 50 per cent of the victims had homes and families, and most of them were above 50 years of age.

Power outages remained an issue vis-à-vis the deaths caused by the heatwave as people living in poorly-ventilated houses were found to be most affected by the sizzling weather.

The government earlier said at least 37pc of the heatwave victims were women.

Health experts said those who lived under the sky found no outlet to cater to dehydration caused by heatstroke in the month of fasting.

Responding to the increasing dem­ands by experts and civil society, Sindh local government minister, Sharjeel Inam Memon, on Thursday ordered for widespread tree plantation in the city and elsewhere in the province.

Once a yearly feature, plantation of trees has virtually stalled in Karachi for many years since the city found no new mayor because of delays in local government elections.

Doctors and environmentalists blame the KMC, which is being run by government-appointed bureaucrats for six years, for uprooting thousands of fully grown trees in the city for unexplained reasons depriving shelter to those directly exposed to the sun.

Records show that the effect of the heatwave on the young population was phenomenally low. Though hundreds of children were shifted to hospitals, very few did not survive.

Some experts say children survive heatstroke better than elders as they normally do not fast and take liquids when needed. However, others refer to many studies saying children should be more vulnerable to heatstroke.

Published in Dawn, July 3rd, 2015

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