UAE to add 70 more beds to field hospital in Pakistan
By Maria Khan - PakistanTimes.net Diplomatic Correspondent

ISLAMABAD: The UAE government has decided to expand and add 70 more beds to the 100-bed UAE Field Hospital in Balakot.

A team of additional doctors, nurses and paramedical staff has already reached Islamabad by a chartered flight.

The UAE Envoy in Pakistan Ali Mohammad Al Shamsi said Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri held a meeting with the President of UAE in Abu Dhabi on Monday. He described the meeting as constructive and fruitful.

Al Shamsi said the Kasuri handed over a special message to President Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan from the President and the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Aid Requirements

He said an official delegation from the UAE would shortly visit Pakistan to assess short-and long-term aid requirements.

Meanwhile, Minister for Interior Aftab Khan Sherpao visited the hospital. The head of the medical team Dr Mohammad Sabil Al Anhani said that the field hospital is daily receiving 550 to 600 injured persons mostly women and children, 20 per cent of them are suffering from bone fractures.

The outdoor clinic has so far treated 5,200 patients in eleven days.

Tent Village

A tent village has also been erected adjacent to the field hospital to keep the injured receiving first aid under observation for a couple of days.

Dr Danhai said that 70 tetanus cases were discovered in the affected areas and several cases were also reported to his hospital. Twenty children were infected with measles, he added.

Six moblie units are moving daily to nearest location to the inaccessible remote villages to give first aid to survivors and distribute relief goods among them.

Disease warning Network

At the same time, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pakistani health ministry have established an early warning and response network to identify and respond to outbreaks of disease in quake-ravaged areas of the country.

“It’s up and running and routine data is slowly coming in,” Altaf Musani, emergency operations manager and a spokesman for the World Health Organization (WHO), told Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, there had been no reported outbreaks.

Working in close collaboration with the Ministry of Health (MoH), the surveillance mechanism had been dispatched throughout the quake-affected area, Musani explained, with key locations at Balakot and Mansehra in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province [NWFP] and Muzaffarabad, Bagh and Rawalakot in Azad Kashmir.

The Objective

“The idea is that they do outreach to periphery areas from there,” the WHO official clarified - reporting to one of the five locations.

“If there is an outbreak, there is no point waiting 10 days before the outbreak is reported,” he asserted.

Working in teams of 10, the programme is designed to complement health teams already on the ground.

Meanwhile, vaccination drive against measles and tetanus would be started from October 26 in the earthquake-hit areas, said Executive District Officer Health (EDO), Dr Syed Ali Khan on Wednesday.

Eleven area supervisors have been selected to run the 76 mobile teams set up for this purpose, he informed and added that World Health Organization [WHO] has provided vaccine as a precautionary measure to meet the challenges of health hazards posed to the quake affected people.●