A PARTICULARLY cold, dry, and smoggy winter has left Punjab with an estimated 8000 pneumonia cases and around 300 deaths in the month of January alone, with children and others with weak immunity seemingly most at risk from the virus. Preventative measures including extended school holidays, shortened class hours, and mandated face masks have, thus far, failed to contain the pneumonia outbreak.
The crisis has been exacerbated by the fact that the available vaccines are not proving quite effective, according to healthcare experts, while increasing vaccine uptake continues to be an uphill task in Pakistan.
Despite progress when it comes to getting more children immunized, Pakistan has among the world’s highest number of children who have not received routine immunization. As a result, many Pakistani children continue to die of preventable illnesses, with under-five deaths accounting for an estimated 50 per cent of the country’s total mortality.
Aside from insufficient immunization, according to the National Nutrition Survey 2018, over 40 per cent of Pakistani children under the age of five are stunted and nearly a third suffers from wasting and are underweight. All these factors make Pakistani children particularly vulnerable to serious illnesses.
Throw in an extremely polluted environment and the fact that much of the population simply cannot afford to stay warm during the winter, and we get all the ingredients for the kind of healthcare crisis Punjab is now going through.
According to UNICEF, roughly half of all childhood pneumonia fatalities are associated with air pollution, of which there is plenty in Pakistan. Over 98 per cent of the country’s population reportedly lives in areas where the annual average particulate pollution level exceeds both WHO guidelines for air pollution and the country’s own air quality standards.
If we take into account the fact that Pakistan’s air pollution woes have only gotten worse over time, the decline in life expectancy might even increase. Given the poor state of the relevant pollution and health indicators, the only thing that is truly surprising about this year’s pneumonia outbreak is that we did not see it coming.
Ensuring that such a devastating viral outbreak does not strike in future winters will require improvement on multiple fronts. Ensuring more Pakistani children are immunized, properly fed, and have access to basic health services ought to be a top priority, especially immunization.
Children should not be dying of diseases when the vaccine for them is readily available in the country. Air pollution is going to be a tougher nut to crack. The burning of waste in the open, poor emissions standards for vehicles and industrial units, and cross-border pollution will have to be addressed over the long term to reduce exposure to pneumonia.
A key struggle will be affording better emissions and waste management technology and infrastructure, which seems like a tall task given the nation’s strained financial resources. As a result, it seems smog will be something that Pakistanis have to learn to live with for the coming years.
However, by boosting the health of the country’s children and the affordability of utilities like gas, we can ensure that we are as protected from high levels of pollution as possible.
views expressed are writer’s own.
