perspective-health

The Age Of Consent And The Borders Of Belief

ICT Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2025 marks a pivotal step toward a safer, progressive Pakistan KARACHI. Child rights organisations and advocates, along with concerned citizens, have warmly welcomed the passage of recent legislation on child marriages, describing it as a landmark step toward protecting the rights and well-being of children. “The passage of the ICT Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2025…

THE SCREEN-TIME TRAP

It’s a common scenario. A parent wants to do some chores or wants some free time for his or her self and the child may be causing disruptions or being clingy. Finding no other way to distract the child, the parent gives his/her smartphone to the child to keep them…

Prevention is Cheaper

Each year, climate-induced disasters cost Pakistan billions of dollars and push millions…

Glaucoma for Children

A nice year old Hajra visited the paediatric ophthalmology department at our…

Half of Pakistan’s Children Suffer from Anaemia

More than half of Pakistan’s children suffer from anaemia, while vitamin A and D deficiencies are common among women and adolescent girls. These deficiencies weaken immunity, impair learning and raise health costs across communities. Pakistan loses nearly $17 billion each year in productivity and healthcare costs linked to these preventable…

Limiting Screen Time

CHILDREN need education, physical activity, family and relaxation as well as adequate time for sleep (around nine to 12 hours depending on their age). This has become harder to manage as screen time has been increasing a lot in recent decades. A typical day for me —before the era of…

Ending TB

WORLD Tuberculosis Day is meant to remind governments that one of humanity’s oldest diseases remains among its deadliest. Despite decades of medical progress, TB continues to infect millions each year. The WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Report 2025 estimates that 10.7m people developed TB in 2024and about 1.23m died, making it the…

Polio Relief?

Years of hard work and relentless vaccination campaigns have finally brought Pakistan to a point where it can taste optimism. According to news reports, Data from Pakistan’s Polio Eradication Programme shows that the majority of the environmental samples collected during the first two months of 2026 have tested negative for…

Reproductive Health Awareness

Parliament has done something this week that once seemed nearly impossible in Pakistan’s legislative culture. It passed a bill mandating reproductive health education in schools. The Federal Supervision of Curricula Amendment Bill, cleared by both houses and awaiting presidential assent, requires that students aged 14 and above in Islamabad’s educational…

Thalassaemia Testing

The National Assembly’s passage of the bill mandating premarital thalassaemia screening in Islamabad is a much-needed first step towards reducing the incidence of the potentially deadly blood disorder. The disorder, which is hereditary, has an unusually high rate of incidence in countries such as Pakistan and areas with large South…

Children at risk

Pakistan has once again found itself in the middle of a rapidly expanding public health challenge: childhood obesity. The latest findings from the World Obesity Atlas 2026 should ideally serve as a wakeup call for our health authorities. Since 2010, the prevalence of obesity among Pakistani children and adolescents has…

Starved Childhoods

EVERY day, in homes across Pakistan, millions of children are quietly being left behind. Not by flood or famine, earthquake or epidemic, but by the slow, invisible erosion of chronic undernutrition. The crisis unfolding concerns the 40 percent of Pakistani children under five who are stunted, the nearly 10m children…

Polio, again

ANOTHER child has fallen victim to polio, this time in Sindh. The National Institute of Health this week confirmed that a four-year-old from Bello in Sujawal, Sindh, is infected with the wild poliovirus, making this the first case in 2026. The development brings back into the limelight Pakistan’s long fight…

The Road to School is Harder for Some

PESHWAR: Every day, 15-year-old Mashal Khan, a sixth-grade student, walks three kilometres from his home to his government high school in Jalala. The journey takes him longer than other children and is especially arduous because he was born with disability in both feet. “It is very difficult for me to…

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