Water shortage causes skin ailments in Karachi

Nearly 500 people living in coastal communities near the southern port city of Karachi have been diagnosed with ailments caused by the poor quality and shortage of water, health and environment officials said on Wednesday. A press release issued by a local organisation working for the rights of the fishing community, the Pakistan Fisher Folk Forum (PFF), said it had organised a medical camp earlier in the week where hundreds of people were diagnosed with skin and eye allergies, as well as fever, caused by polluted water. Thousands of people in Sindh Province are forced to use dirty water due to shortages caused by the three-year ongoing drought which has destroyed thousands of acres of farmland in the country. The head of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) coastal ecosystems unit in Pakistan, Tahir Qureshi, told IRIN by telephone from Karachi that many more people were at risk from contaminated water in the sprawling coastal communities. "There are nearly 150,000 people living in villages along the coast near Karachi," Qureshi said. "They either get no water or it is mostly polluted by effluents from industries or domestic waste." Karachi’s daily discharge of about 300 million gallons of domestic waste is more than the roughly 157,000 million gallons treated by the city’s four treatment plants, Qureshi said. "According to the 1997 Environment Act, it is mandatory for all effluents to be treated before they are let out into the natural environment," the IUCN official said. "The problem is, these effluents come from industries, percolate downwards and then mix with corroded sewage pipes before blending with water intended for domestic consumption." The PFF press release detailed the problems affecting 16 villages, where people attending the medical camp staffed by doctors from different hospitals and organisations said they had not received any medical help for the past four years. Water problems afflict even urban areas within Karachi’s city limits, said Dr Mohammed Yousuf, coordinator of the Urban Health Programme (UHP) of the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Aga Khan University. A recent investigation by the UHP into the outbreak of a mysterious illness in Rehri Goth, a small community in Karachi, yielded almost 40 samples indicating cholera from among 300 randomly tested people. "We were able to put it down in time," said Dr Yousuf. "But, as long as the water remains a problem, situations like these could keep arising."