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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Not all parents have an equal chance of success at saving their child from a fatal illness. Unfortunately, while fate determines lifespan, so does geography. According to experts, childhood cancer survival rates exceed 80 per cent in wealthy countries but in low- and middle-income countries, such as Pakistan,
PAKISTAN’S health sector is no longer merely under strain, it is in complete disarray. The Pakistan Medical Association’s Health of the Nation 2026 report reveals a crisis that has long festered, is preventable and most worryingly, normalised. The numbers should jolt policymakers: 675 newborns and 27 mothers die
The teacher was halfway through explaining a lesson when she suddenly stopped. A piece of chalk slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor as her eyes fixed on a child sitting in the corner of the classroom. The boy had begun rocking his chair back and
JUST when we thought Pakistan had made meaningful progress and the debate on child marriage was nearly settled, a spanner has been thrown into the spokes of reform. Four years after the Federal Shariat Court’s ruling in 2021 that setting a minimum marriage age is not in contradiction