Daily Times

PESHAWAR: As the World Hepatitis Day is being observed today (Thursday), health experts have said that Pakistan is climbing up in ranking with growing number of hepatitis patients.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) report, around 400 million people were suffering from hepatitis across the globe while 95%-affected people were unaware that they harboured the disease. It said that every 12 in 100 suffer from the chronic disease.

Medical reports suggest that over 20 million people in Pakistan are infected with the deadly disease. Out of those, 15 million were hosts to C type of the virus.

According to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Health Department, around 50,000 patients of hepatitis were in the province including 37,000 carrying type C and more than 10,000 hepatitis B patients.

KP Hepatitis Control Programme Project Director Dr Kalim Ullah said that there were more than 12,000 hepatitis C patients and over 3,462 patients were diagnosed with the chronic disease.

“The ratio of hepatitis C is increasing day by day in KP as we have no accurate data that how many people were infected with HCV,” Kalim added.

He said that the provincial government had allocated Rs 500 million for the treatment of hepatitis, thalassaemia and HIV patients. “Swat is on the top of list with 1,200 registered HCV patients while Mardan district is second in the list.

He said that there were only 32 centres established in teaching and district headquarter hospital where the patients were being provided free of cost medicine. He, however, said that the health department could not reach out to every patient and provide treatment accordingly.

Dr Kalim said that sharing of shave raiser, used syringe, blood transfusion, and piercing, un-sterilised equipment were the major cause of hepatitis disease.