Our Correspondent
Muzaffarabad
President Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK) Sardar Masood Khan has urged medical fraternity particularly the physicians of Pakistan and Azad Kashmir to voice their concern over the worst health crisis in Illegally Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK). ‘The people in the IIOJK are faced with the worst health crisis of their history as the Indian occupation forces use pellet guns as a mean of crowed control maiming, blinding, and injuring them’, he asserted.
The AJK President was addressing a gathering of over 500 doctors and senior health consultants from all the four provinces of Pakistan here at an Annual Mid-Summer meet. Organized by Pakistan Society of Internal Medicine (PSIM), the event was also addressed by President of PSIM, Prof Javed Akram, Senior Vice President Prof Aziz Rehman, Dr Somia Iqtadar, Prof Bikha Ram Devrajani and others.
Sardar Masood said that the IIOJK people not only suffered from grievous eye injuries but they also have been denied access to communication as well as all level of primary, secondary or tertiary healthcare amidst year-long lockdown. The occupied territory lacks healthcare staff, drugs, surgical material and the equipment needed for healthcare, he said and cited a report published by the Wall Street Journal, which had suggested that hospitals in IIOJK have become graveyards because of a crisis like humanitarian and health emergency situation prevails there.
Citing another report released by Doctors Sans Frontier (MSF) compiled in collaboration with the University of Kashmir, the AJK President said that some sort of mental distress, anxiety, Depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) prevails among nearly 1.8 million Kashmiri adults – 45 per cent of the region’s adult population. ‘Children seeing killings, physical torture, sexual abuses and destroyed properties before them are particularly suffering from PTSD,’ he added.
He also expressed his deep gratitude to the University of Health Sciences (UHS) for granting affiliation to the medical colleges of the liberated territory and maintained that this would help AJK improve the quality of medical education being imparted to the students in the state. Referring to the recent outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Sardar Masood said that Pakistan and Azad Kashmir had risen to the occasion and responded to the catastrophe with courage and resilience. ‘By the grace of Almighty Allah, we have done well despite all the limitation by keeping the number of fatalities extremely low,’ he said.
