Karachi: As the new year began, Karachi’s youngest residents found themselves on the front line of a worsening public health crisis, with 300 dog bite victims, most of them children under five, brought to Indus Hospital and Health Network in just the first five days of 2026.
The cases were reported at Indus Hospital Korangi alone and involved bites from potentially rabid dogs roaming multiple parts of the city, including Korangi, Landhi, Baldia, Gadap Town and Hub Chowki. Hospital data show that all facial bite cases involved children under two years of age, highlighting the extreme vulnerability of toddlers to stray dog attacks.
Prof Dr Naseem Salahuddin, Head of Infectious Diseases at Indus Hospital and Pakistan’s leading authority on rabies encephalitis, described the figures as alarming and said they reflect a dangerous failure to protect children from a completely preventable disease.
“These are not just numbers. These are babies and very young children being bitten on the face and hands,” she said. “Every dog bite must be treated as a medical emergency. Rabies is almost invariably fatal once symptoms appear, but it is entirely preventable if treatment is started immediately.”
According to hospital records, all 300 patients received rabies post exposure prophylaxis in accordance with World Health Organization guidelines. Among them was a 41 year old man whose injuries were so severe that doctors were forced to amputate a finger. The most serious concern, however, remained the facial bites in infants and toddlers, which carry a higher risk due to shorter incubation periods and proximity to the brain.
Prof Salahuddin warned that untreated or poorly treated dog bites carry a very high risk of rabies and that delays remain common. “People still wash wounds and go home, or seek care days later. Some turn to traditional remedies. That delay can mean death,” she said.
The sharp spike in early 2026 cases comes on the heels of an already devastating year nationwide. More than 600,000 people were officially reported bitten by stray dogs across Pakistan in 2025, according to provincial and federal surveillance data. Sindh alone accounted for around 284,000 cases, with Karachi contributing nearly 110,000 to 115,000 incidents.
Public health experts believe even these figures underestimate the true scale of the problem. Due to underreporting, private treatment and reliance on informal care, the actual number of dog bite incidents last year is estimated to be between one million and 1.5 million nationwide.
Women and children continue to make up the majority of victims, particularly in densely populated urban neighbourhoods with poor waste management, where stray dog populations flourish. Children are frequently bitten while playing outside or walking to school, while women are attacked during routine household activities.
Punjab separately recorded about 277,000 dog bite cases by October 2025, along with eight confirmed rabies deaths, the highest annual figure on record for the province. However, Punjab does not routinely share dog bite data with the national disease surveillance system, limiting federal planning for vaccines and rabies control.
Experts warn that every dog bite requires costly treatment, including multiple vaccine doses and, in severe cases, rabies immunoglobulin. With hundreds of thousands of bites reported each year, the financial burden on Pakistan’s health system runs into hundreds of millions of rupees, particularly in cities like Karachi where hospitals are already overstretched.
Despite rabies being entirely preventable, Pakistan continues to record avoidable human deaths due to delayed treatment, incomplete vaccination and weak control of stray dog populations. Fragmented municipal responsibility, poor waste disposal and the absence of coordinated dog vaccination and sterilisation programmes have allowed the crisis to deepen.
As Karachi begins 2026 with hundreds of dog bite victims in a matter of days, Prof Salahuddin warned that without urgent preventive action, hospitals will continue to see young children arriving with life threatening injuries. “Treating bite victims saves lives, but prevention is the real solution. Until that happens, our children remain at the mercy of stray dogs,” she said.
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