The President of the Pakistan Academy of Family Physicians (PAFP), Dr. Tariq Mehmood, has claimed that 70 to 80 percent of the patients coming in are dengue cases, but the government is reporting only five percent.
He revealed this while speaking at an event at the academy.
He continued that the primary health system in Pakistan is not up to the standard of the World Health Organization (WHO), thus making it hard to improve the treatment methods in any way.
He explained that the doctors undertaking house jobs at the primary level are not trained in accordance with the necessary standards, resulting in a high volume of patients in hospitals’ Outpatient departments (OPDs), while the expensive treatment is being administered only on the basis of tests without taking the family history into account.
In related news, the District Health Officers (DHOs) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) have been ordered to collect data about dengue cases from private hospitals as well as government hospitals, as a gap in the statistics was discovered.
The collected data from the extensive surveys of all government and private hospitals will help control the spread of vector-borne diseases in the province.