Islamabad: Pakistan’s leading health scientists, infectious disease experts and public health professionals have called on federal and provincial authorities to immediately stop what they describe as a culture of secrecy around disease data, warning that withholding accurate figures on infections particularly HIV is undermining prevention efforts and allowing the virus to spread unchecked into the general population.
The demand comes at a time when official data itself is raising alarm, with at least 2,108 children diagnosed with HIV across the country over the past 12 to 15 months, a figure experts say reflects ongoing transmission through unsafe healthcare practices and poor infection control.
Many fear the actual burden could be significantly higher than reported numbers, pointing to gaps in surveillance and reluctance in public disclosure.
Former Punjab health minister and renowned physician Prof. Javed Akram said there should be no question of hiding HIV data, stressing that transparency was central to controlling the disease.
“Data and numbers of HIV should not be hidden or concealed at all. Rather, we need to move towards national level screening so that the real burden of disease is identified and addressed,” he said, calling for an aggressive shift from selective surveillance to population based screening.
Globally recognised Pakistani health scientist Prof. Zulfiqar Bhutta, who serves as Founding Director of the Institute for Global Health and Development at Aga Khan University and holds the Robert Harding Chair in Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, said concealing facts about HIV was unacceptable and pointed to institutional weaknesses in disease surveillance.
“Of course not. This was the job of the defunct CDC at the National Institute of Health, which has been missing in action for over two years,” he said, indicating that the country’s epidemiological tracking systems had weakened at a critical time.
Former federal director general health and infectious diseases specialist Dr. Rana Muhammad Safdar warned that reluctance in sharing health data was actively harming disease control efforts. He emphasised that while patient confidentiality must always be protected, restricting access to aggregated public health data had serious consequences.
“Undue reluctance on health data sharing is not only unasked for but also detrimental to disease prevention and control,” he said. “This becomes even more critical in communicable diseases like HIV which have a long incubation period, where a single undiagnosed case can infect multiple others without any visible symptoms.”
Drawing on Pakistan’s experience during the Covid pandemic, Dr. Safdar said transparency had proven to be one of the most effective tools in managing a national health crisis. “Real time sharing of surveillance and vaccination data built trust between the government, media and the public. That trust translated into better compliance with public health measures and more responsible reporting,” he noted, warning that reversing this approach could erode credibility and weaken response systems.
Former federal health minister and infectious diseases expert Dr. Faisal Sultan was more cautious but underscored the importance of accurate data. “Are they concealing? I don’t know,” he said. “But for reducing the spread of disease, it is essential to know the numbers accurately for data driven decision making. Concealment, if done, does not help and does not work.”
Renowned epidemiologist Dr. Rana Jawad Asghar said hiding disease figures made effective control nearly impossible, stressing that transparency was fundamental to public health practice. “Absolutely not. Hiding numbers makes controlling diseases more difficult if not impossible,” he said.
He added that trust was the cornerstone of epidemic management. “The first lesson in risk communication is to develop trust with the media and the community. You need to be the first to share information, be transparent and truthful. Once that trust is lost, it takes years to rebuild. Community and media engagement are central to controlling any outbreak,” he said, adding that while data itself may be objective, its collection and reporting can be influenced.
Senior public health expert Prof. Sameen Siddiqi of Aga Khan University said withholding data reflected a deeper governance issue. “Hiding data means the government is in a denial phase. Acknowledging the problem is the first step towards solving it,” he said, calling for institutional reforms to improve surveillance and reporting systems.
However, Vice Chancellor of Health Services Academy Prof. Shahzad Ali Khan rejected the notion that data was being deliberately concealed, arguing that the real issue was structural limitations in surveillance. “No one is hiding the numbers. The fact is, we do not capture HIV in the general population,” he said.
He explained that Pakistan’s HIV monitoring system largely focuses on high risk groups and is implemented through non governmental organisations and local level programmes, leaving significant gaps in understanding transmission within the broader population.
In contrast, senior infectious diseases specialist Prof. Naseem Salahuddin strongly criticised any attempt to restrict public access to disease information. “Concealing information from the public when it directly concerns them is unacceptable. All major diseases should be displayed on a national dashboard at the NIH, accessible to every citizen,” she said, advocating for real time, publicly available surveillance data.
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