Stomach worms are increasing day by day among people in Pakistan, due to which they can suffer from many diseases, the most common of which are anaemia and iron deficiency.
This was stated by renowned health practitioner Dr Abdullah Shah Baghdadi while talking to APP here Sunday. He said stomach worms are a common disease that often occurs in children.
Pakistan’s weather provides a favorable environ-ment for these worms in the stomach for example, eating raw cooked things, not washing vegetables and fruits well, contaminated water, substandard food and drinks.
He said that the common cause is lack of hygiene, if a child has worms in their stom-ach, they have iron deficiency anemia. In addition, he said, they may suffer from intestinal obstruction, inflammation of the gallbladder and especially in women, stone disease.
Apart from chronic diarrhea due to stomach worms, there are many other diseases that should be avoided every six months, he added.
Stomach deworming medicine should be taken. In order to eradicate stomach worms in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Educa-tion and Health Departments are jointly conducting a campaign to eliminate stomach worms in 22 dis-tricts of the province.
This insecticide is approved by the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan, he informed. In this campaign, children between 5 to 14 years of age will be given deworming medicine.
To be started on school basis, children will be fed deworming medicine to prevent them from diseases, he said.
He said, last year 2021 in Mardan district, about 2,140 public and private school children as well as 352,848 madrasas students were given medicines. He said the annual large-scale deworm-ing campaign of children is important for the physi-cal and cognitive development of children.
It will make the children’s body resistant to infection, im-prove the school performance of the children, the top health priorities of the government of Pakistan include elimination of malnutrition and anaemia, for which deworming is fast, easy and the safest method is treatment.
Abdullah Shah Baghdadi said some children de-velop a habit of eating thread, cloth or any irregular object.
Although there may be many other reasons, saliva flows from the mouth or teeth grind at night. Children often cry at night, there is itching at the stool or they become obsessed with eating sweets or lack of appetite and slowness is also a symptom.