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Parents watch nervously as their children wait for an HIV test in a village in southern Pakistan, where hundreds of people have reportedly been infected by a doctor using a contaminated syringe.
Sent to maintain order, the police scrutinize the anxious crowd as families rush into one of five screening rooms set up last month in the village of Wasayo, on the outskirts of Larkana, in Sindh province.
Health officials said that more than 400 people, many of them children, had been HIV-positive in recent weeks, while experts warn of an increase in infection rates in Pakistan, due to the use of unhealthy equipment and abusive practices – often in the hands of charlatans doctors. .
Anger and fear continue to grow in the desperately poor village, hard hit by the epidemic, which, according to the authorities, could be linked to gross negligence or malicious intent on the part of one. local pediatrician.
"They arrive by the dozens," says a doctor at the makeshift clinic, faced with a lack of equipment and staff to treat the growing number of patients.
Mukhtar Pervez is anxiously waiting for his daughter to be tested, fearing that a recent fever may be related to the epidemic. For others, their worst fears have already become a reality.
Nisar Ahmed arrived at the clinic in search of relentless drugs after the positive test of his daughter one year old three days earlier.
"I curse [the doctor] which caused the infection of all these children, "he says angrily.
Neighbor Imam Zadi accompanies five of his children to be examined after his grandson's positive test.
"The whole family is so upset," she told AFP.
Others fear that the future of their children may be irretrievably compromised after contracting HIV, particularly in a country where the majority of the rural poor do not understand the disease or have access to treatment.
"With whom will she play? And when she has grown up, who will want to marry her? Asks a crying mother from a nearby village, who asked not to give her name, to her four-year-old daughter who has just been tested positive.
Source: NDTV
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