Daily Times

It’s definitely not a big surprise that a rare ‘brain-eating amoeba is running riot in Karachi and killing people, young and old alike, up and down the city. It turns out that the Naegleria fowleri, a very rare and deadly waterborne amoeba that thrives in freshwater sources and reservoirs and causes an infection called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), has contaminated the port city’s water supply and now pretty much everybody is drinking possibly poisoned water.

And it’s even less of a surprise that the Karachi Water Sewage Board is not willing to take any responsibility for water contamination that occurs due to leakage in sewage lines. According to Karachi’s health department, 95 per cent of water samples collected from 50 union councils in the city showed that they were not fit for consumption. And the best that authorities can do for the moment is to advise people to mix a couple of tablespoons of commonly available bleaching powder in water to make a paste and dump it in their water tanks at night. It’s another story altogether, of course, that most households would now be counting on the bleaching powder available in their neighbourhoods to be pure, at least, especially since the price of this particular commodity is now expected to skyrocket owing to artificially created roaring demand.

It’s a crying shame that the country’s trading hub, the only port city so far, and home of the very top elite of Pakistan’s business community is allowed to rot in this fashion. The central and provincial governments got together to hammer out a package to save the city, even though they woke up too late, but that initiative also got lost in all the noise created by the mistrust between PTI and PPP. So Karachi continues to give the look of a very large shanty town living on borrowed time, littered with stinking and rotten garbage on both sides of all major roads and highways and now with poison, quite literally, flowing through its water pipes. What is more, the rainy season is upon us and the usual flooding will once again provide the ideal habitat for deadly diseases and viruses to thrive. What more could authorities possibly need to finally give the city what it needs. When the residents of the country’s most important city – the largest taxpayer, largest revenue earner, etc. – struggle to find clean water, one can only imagine what sorts of other problems they must face as part of their daily routine. Surely, this state of affairs cannot go on for much longer. So the sooner somebody does something about, it the better. *