PESHAWAR: Dengue haemorrhagic fever is likely to appear this year too as the government is yet to release the required funds to start preparation for measures aimed at prevention of the mosquito-borne ailment, according to officials.

A district health officer (DHO) in one of the high-risk areas told Dawn that last year the province recorded 23,000 dengue cases and 18 deaths, mostly because of the delay in release of funds by the government to take preventive measures.

“We require money from the government in January or February to take preventive measures like spraying of standing water pools, distribution of impregnated bed nets among at-risk population, repair and maintenance of pumps and training of doctors and staff on case management and larva identification and elimination etc,” he said.

The DHO said that last year dengue cases started emerging in April and continued till October and same trend continued in the province for the past few years.

Govt yet to release required funds to health dept for the purpose

He said that they were still waiting for payment of the money they had spent on purchasing fuel for vehicles to travel to the field for monitoring and sample collection last year.

Sources in health department said that a request was sent to the finance department for release of Rs235 million to start preparations and reduce the cases and mortality from the virus in the ongoing year. The department had also submitted the revised Dengue Action Plan along with item-wise expenditure and hoped early release of the amount, they said.

“In 2022, had the government provided us with the funds earlier, we could have cut down the cases and mortalities by half. Las year we got money from the government in August when the full-scale infection had started. The same can happen again in case of delay in provision of funds to undertake preventive measures,” said sources.

They said that health department mobilised the already available resources last year due to which the number of cases was less than the expected.

“Keeping in view the weaknesses we faced last year, we have revised the plan. Under the new plan, we want to launch early awareness campaigns in schools, community and mosques to enlist support of religious scholars to put brakes on the vector-borne disease,” they said.

Sources said that health department wanted to brief the new chief secretary on dengue situation in the province, its related issues and solutions. They said that the former chief secretary had attended several briefings due to which he had ordered a close coordination among the line departments to reduce dengue cases in the province.

They said that each year, dengue cases started in April and continued to rise till end of October. They added that downtrend in the cases started only when the temperature fell below 20 Celsius.

“Every year, the province experiences dengue outbreaks because of lack of preventive steps in a timely manner. It is a known pattern and we know how to deal with it but we need funds,” said sources in health department.

According to them, the only way to deal with the vector-borne illness is to involve all 19 line departments to destroy larva, eliminate water pools and stop production of mosquitoes. The health department also requires permanent workers for the purpose like Punjab, which has 100,000 dedicated staff to strengthen dengue surveillance.

Published in Dawn, February 18th, 2023