‘Worse than the flood days.’ Free clinics in Pakistan overwhelmed, but help is there
When floods destroyed his home and crops in Pakistan, Imam Ali was faced with a difficult reality. His family had no choice but to leave their village.
They moved to Larkana, a city an hour west. As the family struggled with life on the streets, Ali had to rush his young son, Sajjad, to an emergency room. The boy was going into septic shock.
In just four hours, Sajjad regained the ability to sit up and talk — thanks to emergency care from ChildLife Foundation.
The nonprofit provides medical treatment to sick and poor children in Pakistan, said founder Ashraf Amdani, who lives in Weston in Broward County. He established ChildLife after the country’s 2010 super floods.
Massive flooding across Pakistan in the late summer left nearly half of the country underwater and more than 33 million Pakistanis — 15% of the population — displaced. The south Asian country saw at least $40 billion in damage, with millions of homes and farms destroyed.
“The situation is really peculiar right now,” Amdani said. “It’s getting worse than during the flood days.”
ChildLife has 12 free, 24-hour ERs across Pakistan. So far, workers have cared for more than 150,000 flood-related patients this year.
Five of the emergency rooms, located in Hyderabad, Nawabshah, Larkana, Sukkur and Quetta, have been overcrowded since the floods, Amdani said. The more than 500 medical professionals at these locations are treating three times the usual volume of children daily.
“That’s the maximum capacity even though we are using other wards,” Amdani said. “They are getting very, very sick now by drinking ... dirty water. They have other stomach diseases because they don’t have the right nutrition.”
Young children in the country are at high risk for waterborne diseases like diarrhea, cholera, malaria and dengue. Increases in outbreaks have concerned Pakistani healthcare workers.
The nonprofit also funds free medical camps, where doctors provide treatment and medications, in severely impacted areas like Sindh and Balochistan, Amdani said.
ChildLife also is trying to treat those in remote areas — or where infrastructure is impassable — through its telemedicine network, he said. But reaching patients with telehealth is still a challenge because of technological barriers.
While the organization treats about 1.2 million children every year, it expects that the number to grow by 250,000 due to the floods and their aftermath.
And so ChildLife has had to adapt to increasing demand, which comes with more expenses, such as buying extra beds and hiring extra workers, Amdani said. He said the nonprofit is exploring ways to address unmet needs, such as providing affordable housing and improving hygienic systems.
“Our goal now is to really ... get them some kind of place and clean water,” Amdani said. “As soon as we can get people clean water, some of them will not get sick.”