Pakistan Electricity Power Company (PEPCO) seems to be facilitating dengue mosquitoes by continuing the load shedding tradition during nights.
The increase in load shedding is causing issues for the private and public hospitals, as the closure of electricity creates problems in conducting blood tests. The load shedding schedule, which is three hours of outages at night (between 10pm to 5am) and three hours during the day, seem to be easing the dengue mosquitoes.
In the entire city, including Faisal Town, Model Town, Township, Walled City, Muslim Town, Wahdat Road, Defence, Cantonment and other areas, the unscheduled load shedding is creating issues for the citizens. Citizens complain that they can neither sleep at night nor can they stay safe from mosquitoes. They said that the anti-mosquito machines required electricity to run and in an absence of electricity, these machines stopped working and gave mosquitoes the opportunity to bite them.
They said it was high time for the PEPCO to change the load shedding schedule and end night time outages so that they could sleep soundly without the threat of dengue mosquitoes. A citizen, Irfan Khan, said that the Punjab government had given students the liberty to not strictly follow uniforms in schools but the load shedding issue was untouched. He said that it was necessary for the federal government to instruct the PEPCO to stop load shedding during night time so that people could save themselves from mosquitoes.
A resident of Cantonment, Suhail Saleem, said while Lahore faced the dengue outbreak, there was a need for collaborative efforts on part of the government and the individual ministries to combat dengue. He said altering the load shedding schedule was the only way to save people from getting bitten by mosquitoes at night. “PEPCO can carry six hours of load shedding during 7am to 7pm in the day,” he added.
The public and private hospitals are also complaining about the administration and managerial problems caused due to an increase in the load shedding hours, especially while dengue has taken on epidemic proportions. A technician Abdul Razzaq of the Services Hospital blood bank said that a slight fluctuation the supply of electricity resulted in the closure of blood test machines. He said that although the hospital had three power supplies, sometimes all three supplies were closed down which resulted in an unavoidable closure of the blood test machines, worrying the patients and troubling the technicians.
He said that the patients also suffered because of an unhindered load shedding. An administrator of a private hospital in Iqbal Town said that although they had generators in the hospital, it was quite expensive to run the entire hospital on generators for six hours a day.