HYDERABAD: Sindh Health Min­is­ter Dr Sikandar Mandhro has said that the provincial government is trying to establish a unit of the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplan­tation (SIUT) in Hyderabad.

Presiding over a meeting of health officers and talking to journalists in the office of the director general health services Sindh on Friday, he said the health budget was now up by Rs2bn as compared to last year’s.

He said the government was trying to run the health department efficiently so that patients should not suffer. He said the Sindh government would try to establish an SIUT unit in Hyderabad as well, adding that a modern eye hospital was already working in the city.

He admitted that the health department left a lot to be desired, but improvement would be witnessed with the passage of time. He said results of suspected blood samples of chikungunya cases were different. In his recent visit to Chhachhro, he found only one case of this virus out of the 25 suspected cases, he said.

He said that a large number of chikungunya cases were reported in Karachi’s Saudabad area with zero mortality.

Published in Dawn, August 12th, 2017