By Zubeida Mustafa
IT IS located in the heart of Karachi in one of the noisiest and most congested downtown areas near the Quaid-i-Azam’s mausoleum at what was Purani Numaish. Once you enter the gates of Ida Rieu School for the Deaf and Blind you are in a different world altogether. It is spacious, quiet and reasonably green. Continue reading Their voices heard
By Zubeida Mustafa
According to experts from WHO, nearly one out of ten people in Pakistan suffer from mental illness at one stage or another in their lives. It is estimated that 14 million people in the country and 1.2 million in Karachi need psychiatric attention. There are only 200 psychiatrists and 3500 hospital beds to take care of these patients.
Appalling figures no doubt. They, however, do not tell the whole story. Since psychiatric conditions are not major killers they tend to be ignored. Yet the fact is that out of the ten leading causes of disability (in terms of the number of years lived with disability) five are psychiatric disorders. They are debilitating and account for a tenth of the disease burden in all societies.
By Zubeida Mustafa
For four years an eye hospital has been functioning quietly and unobtrusively at Nagan Chowrangi in New Karachi. Not much fanfare attended its opening in July 1993. No political dignitary was invited to grace the occasion. Even today not many people know about the existence of this hospital, except for those who benefit from the services it offers nearly free of cost.
By Zubeida Mustafa
John Hadfield has been visiting Pakistan every year without fail since the late sixties. He has lost count but Is certain that his latest trip to this country this month was his thirtieth. If not more. He says he Is happy here and feels at home, In fact when he was very ill a few years ago, his wife helped him get to his feet by urging him to recover fast so that he could undertake his annual pilgrimage to Pakistan. ‘It was a bit of psychotherapy she tried and It worked,’he remarks.
His mission? To conduct post-graduate surgery courses for Pakistani doctors. These courses are held every year in Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar and according to a rough calculation at least a thousand Pakistani surgeons have benefited from his training. A number of them have attended his courses in Britain and two — the late Haziqul Yaqeen (of KV SITE Hospital, Karachi) and Mahmood Chaudhri (of Sheikh Zayed Hospital, Lahore) — have actually worked under him as his registrars. What is more, Mr Hadfield (the British conventionally do not prefix the title doctor before a surgeon’s name) does not charge a penny for the courses he conducts here. He even pays from his own pocket for his air ticket from London.
And yet when John Hadfield applied for a visa for one of his umpteenth visits, his application was turned down by the visa officer in the Pakistan High Commission in London. He had described the purpose of his visit to be to conduct a course which was not considered to be a valid enough reason for a trip 5,000 miles away. A senior official was more sensible and Mr Hadfield was allowed to come. The following year he simply described himself as a tourist and was promptly issued a visa. Continue reading John Hadfield: Passage to Pakistan
KARACHI: The light at the end of the tunnel for Karim Dad is growing dim-. He is a 36-year-old farm worker from Tando Jan Mohammad and has lived on dialysis for the last five years. A patient of end-stage kidney failure, Karim Dad could not have survived had he not been visiting the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation, Civil Hospital, Karachi, twice a week to be hooked on to the dialysis machine which removes impurities from his blood. (This function is normally performed by the kidneys in a healthy person.)
SIUT has spent Rs 400,000 on Karim Dad so far and not charged him a penny. In the private sector, Karim Dad would have had to pay Rs 1,000,000 for dialysis to stay alive — something beyond his means.
Nizamuddin, a 30-year vegetable vendor from Orangi Town, is in the same boat. A patient of kidney failure, he has been coming for free dialysis to SIUT since July 1990. Continue reading SIUT on life-saving mission