Karachi: At least two children have lost their lives while around a dozen others have tested positive for HIV at the Sindh Employees Social Security Institution’s (SESSI) Valika Hospital in Karachi’s SITE area, officials confirmed on Sunday, in what appears to be a fresh outbreak of the virus among children.
Hospital officials said a total of 14 children from Pathan Colony have so far been confirmed HIV positive after they were brought to the paediatrics ward with persistent fever, infections and unexplained weight loss. Shockingly, all parents of the infected children were tested and found negative for HIV, raising serious concern over how the virus was transmitted to the minors and pointing towards non-sexual, possibly medical-linked transmission.
With no HIV treatment facility at Valika Hospital, the affected children have now been referred to Civil Hospital Karachi (CHK) and other facilities treating HIV patients in the city. The sudden deaths of two of the infected children has triggered panic among parents and local residents.
Hospital officials said initial findings point towards unsafe medical practices in the community. They blamed unqualified healthcare providers and poor infection prevention and control practices, either within the community or by private healthcare providers, as the likely cause of the outbreak. Locals, however, alleged negligence at Valika Hospital and held the facility responsible for the spread.
Residents and community leaders from Pathan Colony demanded that a large-scale HIV screening drive, similar to the Ratodero screening campaign, be launched immediately across SITE Town to identify more possible cases and prevent further transmission. They said delaying screening would be “criminal negligence” given the vulnerability of children in the area.
The Medical Superintendent of Valika Hospital has set up a committee to conduct an internal inquiry into the outbreak and determine whether lapses at the hospital contributed to the transmission of HIV among children.
Public health experts said this incident must not be treated in isolation. In recent months, HIV cases among children have also been reported from Mirpurkhas and Shaheed Benazirabad (Nawabshah) in Sindh, while a similar outbreak was confirmed in Taunsa in Punjab. They said the recurring emergence of pediatric HIV cases outside Larkana shows that the crisis is now spreading to new districts, making it a provincial and national public health emergency.
The crisis was also taken up during a high-level meeting led by Labour Action Committee Chairman Malik Nek Zada Swati, where participants criticised the administration and demanded swift action. They urged the Sindh Labour Minister and SESSI Commissioner to initiate legal action against those responsible, warning that if authorities failed to act, they would pursue legal options themselves.
Public health experts said this was yet another example of the failure of Sindh’s HIV prevention and control programme, which continues to downplay or hide outbreaks instead of taking preventive measures and acknowledging system failures.
Sindh remains the worst-affected province in Pakistan, with nearly 4,000 children now living with HIV. Around 2,300 new HIV infections have already been reported in the province in the first nine months of the current year alone. Officials said repeated outbreaks among children in Larkana, Shikarpur, Ratodero and now Karachi expose the gaps in surveillance, unsafe medical practices and weak oversight of healthcare services, especially in low-income neighbourhoods.
They added that hushing up HIV numbers instead of confronting the crisis has allowed infections to spread unchecked across Sindh.
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