Outside the Lab Screening and monitoring

This is Going to Get Worse: Flooding in Pakistan

Record-shattering flooding devastated Pakistan this year – but how is this affecting the spread of disease?

George Francis Lee | 10/26/2022 | 3 min read | News

Credit: REUTERS, Adrees Latif, https://flic.kr/p/8v6Agz

In August 2022, Pakistan saw some of the worst flooding in its history. Two years prior, Karachi – the largest city in the country – had the highest rainfall in over a century. A decade earlier, Pakistan had floods so devastating that the total number of affected people surpassed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake – combined.

The pattern is clear: for Pakistan, and the world at large, catastrophic weather events are becoming increasingly frequent. The latest flooding is not the first, nor the last that the country will see, which is a significant concern for pathologists and other medical professionals as water-borne diseases rise.

One such pathologist is Shahid Pervez, Senior Consultant Histopathologist at Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH), Pakistan. AKUH is based in Karachi, so Shahid has firsthand experience of how these floods affect the vital healthcare infrastructure of Pakistan’s most populated city. We spoke with him briefly to gain an understanding of how pathologists are dealing with the situation.

The flooding here has left the infrastructure broken, but most of the major damage has been in rural areas of Sindh Province, Balochistan, South Punjab, and areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. This kind of massive flooding has not been seen since Pakistan’s creation 75 years ago. Over 30 million people have been directly affected. Hundreds of thousands of livestock have perished and there has been major loss of rice, cotton, and vegetable crops. Wheat sowing time is around the corner, but it is not clear whether it will be possible to cultivate wheat on this wet land, which raises the possibility of wheat shortage in coming months and years. The response to the flooding has been prompt, but those who were stranded in remote areas with no communication have struggled.

Personally, I am focusing on dengue fever testing and rapid blood testing. Overall, as you might imagine, diarrhea, malaria, cholera, dengue, and other waterborne diseases have all increased. To compound the problem, local basic labs have become nonfunctional due to damage and there is a lack of safe, reliable transport for samples from affected areas.

Our nation has been resilient so far and testing capacity is adequate. In Pakistan, infectious diseases such as COVID-19, dengue, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever must be reported to the government at the provincial and federal levels by law. This means that monitoring is heavily supported.

In Karachi, we need to build capacity and establish mobile basic labs for stat testing such as platelets.

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Outside the Lab Screening and monitoring

George Francis Lee

Associate Editor, The Pathologist

Like most people, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do after university. But one thing was certain – writing would play a central role. Not one to walk the path most traveled, I decided to spend my next few years freelancing to hone my skills as a writer and further cement my love for language. Reaching people through writing is important to me and I look forward to connecting with thousands of people through Texere’s passionate audience.