A team of medical experts from Sri Lanka would help the Punjab government in coping up with the fast spreading dengue epidemic, Health Secretary Jehanzaib Khan said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a media briefing on dengue, he said an 11-member team of experts including doctors and nurses and other specialists would be reaching Lahore to improve government’s efforts in handling the crisis. He said the government had enhanced the capacity of hospitals by turning rooms being used for administrative purposes into dengue wards. He said WAPDA and Pakistan Air Force had also offered their hospitals and now the Punjab government was ready to cater to a greater number of dengue patients.
Moreover, Khan said that now it was the duty of the hospital concerned to arrange transportation for a blood donor to and from the institute of blood transfusion for arrangement of blood platelet kits. Furthermore, he said INMOL had also had an agreement with the government to provide cell separator facility in case there was rush at government health establishments. He also said mosquito nets were being provided to hospitals for dengue patients.
Lahore Commissioner Jawad Rafiq said the government had received complaints that private hospitals were not fulfilling the commitment to provide free treatment facilities to patients. He said the government was consulting a legal team to make arrangements and to make its decision binding upon private health establishments. Professor Faisal Masood said a patient acted as a reservoir of dengue and if a carrier mosquito transferred the virus into a new individual, the virus would take three to seven days to grow in the new individual.
He said the fact that a number of patients were coming with dengue implied that many germs were still in the incubation. He also said there was no medicine to kill the virus across the world. Moreover, he said that residual spray should be conducted which remained effective for three to four months.
