Saleema Akhtar, a middle-aged women with her one year old son, Zubair, in her arms, was waiting for her turn to be seen by a doctor at the out-patient department (OPD) of the of the Children Hospital of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS). She was worried about Zubair’s recurrent illness.
Saleema, the mother of three sons, lives in a slum near Sitara Market, where her younger son, Zubair, is prone to falling ill after every few days since he started crawling. She told Pakistan Today that the doctor had told her that the causes of her son’s illness were bacterial and viral infections. She said doctor also cited the unhygienic living standards and changing weather as the reasons of Zubair’s illness.
This scribe learned that those who are living in slum areas are vulnerable to unhygienic environment and extreme weather conditions. They are deprived people who do not have enough resources to maintain the health of their children.
This scribe witnessed that the poor children of the slums had no shoes and warm clothes to protect themselves against the cold weather.
Saleema told Pakistan Today that she was living in a single-room house, which also served as their kitchen and living room, so it was very difficult for her to keep it clean all the time.
She explained, “My two sons are toddlers, Zubair one-year-old and Hamza, 2 and a half year old, we can not afford pampers, so they sometime defecate while playing and hence the kitchen portion also gets soiled.”
It was observed during a visit to the same slum area that the children were roaming in the streets half naked and many of them were barefooted.
Another health hazard faced by that community is that they have no proper sewerage system in these slums and one can see swage water inundating large tracts of land around the houses. Hence these slums become breeding grounds for a number of diseases.
So when these half naked children play outdoors in the winter, they get exposed to unhygienic conditions and hence they contract pneumonia, pneumonia, whooping and chronic cough and other respiratory diseases.
The parents of these children, when asked about their plight, said they just could not afford a better living and health-care for their children. They said they self-medicate their children and would only take them to state-run hospitals when their condition was serious.
Saleema said, “I cannot afford to go to a private doctor and even avoid going to government-run hospitals since the doctors there won’t pay proper attention to the poor patients. We have to wait in long queues so I try to self-medicate my kids against cough and fever at home. Whenever any of my children coughs or suffers from fever, I administer a dose of these syrups to him.”
Dr Mushtaq, a child specialist, told Pakistan Today that children living in slums were an easy target of chest infections and pneumonia because of their lifestyle.
“These people don’t visit the doctor at the early stage of a disease and treat the kids themselves at home and when they come to us, usually the disease has already got worse,” he added.
