How to Control a Disease in Pakistan? By Controlling the Data
When it comes to public health, authorities in Pakistan have mastered a dangerous trick: hide the numbers, and the disease disappears. Instead of strengthening surveillance and control systems, governments at both federal and provincial levels rely on the politics of denial. If cholera, dengue, HIV, or tuberculosis are not counted, they are not seen. And if they are not seen, there is no responsibility to act.
Take cholera, for instance. Despite laboratories confirming cases, officials often refuse to call it by name, resorting instead to vague phrases like “acute watery diarrhoea.” HIV and TB control authorities, meanwhile, avoid publishing annual or monthly case numbers altogether. It is as if silence could cure the epidemic.
Sindh, which sees thousands of dengue cases each year, is reluctant to announce deaths from the virus. Punjab, wary of political fallout, withholds data from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and other provinces. Ironically, even federally run hospitals in Islamabad and other cities decline to share data with NIH, undermining the very institution tasked with national disease surveillance. Private hospitals also maintain their own walls of secrecy, rarely sharing information with health departments or the health ministry, despite handling vast numbers of patients.
The cost of this culture of concealment is borne by ordinary people. When cases and deaths are not acknowledged, there can be no timely interventions, no targeted awareness campaigns, and no allocation of resources where they are most needed. Surveillance collapses, policy becomes guesswork, and citizens pay with their lives.
Controlling data instead of controlling disease may shield officials from embarrassment, but it leaves the population exposed. Transparency, inter-provincial coordination, and mandatory data sharing by public and private hospitals are the first steps toward genuine disease control. Without them, outbreaks will continue to fester in silence, and Pakistan will remain trapped in a cycle of denial and preventable deaths.
Hiding numbers cannot hide reality. If Pakistan is to protect its people, it must confront the truth instead of burying it.