Eye disease cases on the rise in Chitral

Report Zahiruddin

CHITRAL: The community ophthalmologist of the District Headquarters Hospital has said eye disease ‘trachoma’ is affecting the local population at an alarming rate.
Talking to this corerspondent here on Monday, Dr Faizul Mulk Jilani claimed that every fifth person in the district had contracted the disease.
According to the World Health Organisation, he said, the disease ranked second in eye diseases in the world and the poor nations were more vulnerable to it.
He said the infectious disease, which could lead to blindness, transmitted fast and in Chitral this happened due to its ‘peculiar’ social and cultural circumstances.
Dr Jilani said the disease became hard to be cured when reached a certain stage. He said the high occurrence of the disease in Chitral had been supported by a special survey and the record of the district hospital and it had been established that during summer, the infection spread more rapidly.
He said the disease encompassed five stages before it became incurable and the infected persons in Chitral were well within the safe stages of the disease. He said the WHO had formulated a strategy “SAFE” (surgery, antibiotic, face washing and environmental change) to combat the disease and it needed to be implemented in Chitral on emergency footings.--Dawn