Houston sends health equipment to Pakistan
Houston is sending its sister city of Karachi, Pakistan, a large shipment of medical supplies to help mitigate scarcities in the public health system in one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas.
The Houston nonprofit Medical Bridges loaded a shipment container on Thursday with hospital beds as well as 12 pallets of medical supplies in a ceremony at its headquarters and warehouse south of Houston. Local authorities attended as well as Karachi Mayor Wasim Akhtar, accompanied by a delegation from the Pakistani city.
The shipment is “part of a humanitarian mission that will provide the supplies to 12 clinics and hospitals in and around Karachi,” said Walter Ulrich, president and CEO of the organization. The shipment includes syringes, dressings, gloves and other items used in basic health care procedures.
“People may question, ‘Gloves?’ ” said Ulrich, highlighting the level of precariousness that affects many health service providers in Pakistan. “We have seen gloves and even sutures washed, hung in the sunshine, and then reused.”
He said that, as an example, “30,000 gloves means that 15,000 patients will be treated and operated with new, unused gloves, sparing them from the risk of infection that could hamper their recovery or even lead to a tragic and unnecessary death.”
Muhammad Saeed Sheikh, president of the Houston Karachi Sister City Association, started the initiative when Akhtar recently informed him of a lack of local funding to cover medical needs.
Karachi is the most populous city Pakistan and one of the largest in the world. Between 60 percent and 65 percent of its 20 million inhabitants live in slums, according to local authorities.
Although the local government has improved its public health care services in recent years, around 70 percent of Pakistan’s health system is private and inaccessible to much of the population. Many of the remaining health services are funded and provided by nonprofits and international aid.
Medical Bridges, founded in Houston in 1997, collects donations and unused medical supplies and equipment from hospitals and redirects them to health providers and initiatives in the U.S. and around the world.
According to Medical Bridges, the U.S. medical community generates nearly $9 billion in surplus products every year that cannot be used locally due to national regulations. Examples are unused materials in packages that have been opened, or equipment deemed outdated by U.S. standards.
The supplies loaded on Thursday will be distributed in Karachi by Helping Hand For Relief and Development, a global humanitarian relief and development organization.
Helping Hand USA, rated four out of four stars by Charity Navigator, has been sending more than 12 containers through Medical Bridges to Pakistan and other impoverished regions every year, according to ILyas Choudry, director of programs for the organization.