On World Hepatitis Day 2026, Karachi became a site of reckoning as Dr. Ziauddin Hospital gathered clinicians, scholars, and citizens to confront a quiet epidemic that structural neglect has allowed to deepen. Pakistan carries one of the world's heaviest hepatitis burdens — not by fate, but through the compounding failures of weak governance, unregulated medical practice, and chronic underinvestment in public health. The day's symposium named the disease clearly, traced its roots honestly, and pointed toward the four pillars — vaccination, safe care, early diagnosis, and timely treatment — that
Pakistan Hospital Highlights Hepatitis Crisis as WHO Flags High Disease Burden
Pakistan faces significant disease burden from hepatitis B, C, and AIDS transmission through unsafe medical practices, requiring urgent public health intervention.
Unsafe medical practices are actively spreading hepatitis through the community
Mark
Why is Pakistan specifically vulnerable to hepatitis transmission in a way that other countries might not be?
Mimi
It's not that the virus is different there. It's that the conditions for transmission are unusually favorable. You have informal healthcare providers—people without proper training or oversight—performing procedures with reused needles. You have weak enforcement of medical standards. And you have resource constraints that mean even good policies don't get implemented.
Mark
So this is a healthcare system problem, not just a disease problem.
Mimi
Exactly. The disease is the symptom. The real issue is that the infrastructure to prevent transmission—safe injection practices, regulated providers, accessible vaccination—isn't in place or isn't working.
Mark
What does it mean that chronic hepatitis is now the leading reason for liver transplants at that hospital?
Mimi
It means people are arriving at the end stage of the disease. Their livers are scarred beyond function. A transplant is their only option, and even then, there aren't enough donor organs. It's a measure of how many people have been infected and how long the disease has been circulating without being caught early.
Mark
Can vaccination alone solve this?
Mimi
No. Vaccination prevents new infections, which is crucial. But it doesn't help people already infected. You also need safe medical practices so people aren't getting infected in the first place, and early diagnosis and treatment for those who are already sick.
Mark
What would actually change things?
Mimi
Enforcement of existing policies. Training and regulation of healthcare providers. Resources to support vaccination programs and treatment. And political will to treat this as urgent. Right now, it's being treated as a health problem. It needs to be treated as a crisis.
El Pulso
- Pakistan's classification as a WHO high-burden hepatitis country is not a statistical abstraction — unsafe injections, quackery, and unregulated providers are actively transmitting hepatitis B, C, and AIDS through communities every day.
- A liver transplant surgeon's testimony cut through the policy language: chronic viral hepatitis has become the leading reason patients arrive needing a new liver, meaning the system's failures are being written into human bodies.
- National prevention policies exist on paper but collapse in practice — weak enforcement, poor governance, and resource shortfalls have left the regulatory framework unable to contain informal healthcare providers who operate beyond oversight.
- Experts are pressing four interlocking solutions — broad vaccination coverage, genuinely safe healthcare environments, early diagnosis before damage becomes irreversible, and treatment that is accessible rather than merely available in principle.
- The awareness walk and symposium closed not with triumph but with a challenge directed at policymakers: whether this moment of public acknowledgment will translate into sustained action, or dissolve as past awareness efforts have before it.
On World Hepatitis Day 2026, Karachi became a site of reckoning as Dr. Ziauddin Hospital gathered clinicians, scholars, and citizens to confront a quiet epidemic that structural neglect has allowed to deepen. Pakistan carries one of the world's heaviest hepatitis burdens — not by fate, but through the compounding failures of weak governance, unregulated medical practice, and chronic underinvestment in public health. The day's symposium named the disease clearly, traced its roots honestly, and pointed toward the four pillars — vaccination, safe care, early diagnosis, and timely treatment — that must hold if elimination is ever to move from aspiration to reality.
Karachi marked World Hepatitis Day 2026 with an awareness walk organized by Dr. Ziauddin Hospital, followed by a symposium that drew doctors, faculty, students, and community members into an unflinching conversation about a disease that has quietly taken hold across Pakistan. The World Health Organization has designated the country a high-burden hepatitis nation, and the symposium made clear that this designation reflects structural failure as much as medical misfortune.
Dr. Zaigham Abbas, who leads the hospital's hepato-gastroenterology and liver transplant department, described how unsafe medical practices and quackery are actively spreading hepatitis B, C, and AIDS. The national policies meant to prevent this transmission are not working — undone by weak enforcement, poor governance, the proliferation of informal providers, and chronic resource shortages. Dr. Khurram Baqai mapped the epidemiological scale of the problem, while liver transplant surgeon Dr. Zeeshan Hyder gave it human weight: chronic viral hepatitis has become the primary reason patients arrive needing a new liver.
Prevention emerged as the symposium's central concern, requiring both individual action and systemic reform. Dr. Darayus P. Gazder highlighted immunization as a proven but access-dependent tool, and Prof. S. M. Wasim Jafri closed the gathering by naming four essential pillars: vaccination programs that genuinely reach the population, safe healthcare practices, early diagnosis, and timely treatment people can actually obtain.
Dr. Ziauddin Hospital reaffirmed its commitment to medical education and hepatitis elimination efforts, but the day ended with an open question rather than a resolution — whether Pakistan's policymakers will respond to this crisis with the urgency it demands, or whether the walk through Karachi's streets will fade while unsafe practices continue to spread disease through communities with few defenses.
Karachi woke to an awareness walk through its streets on World Hepatitis Day 2026, organized by Dr. Ziauddin Hospital as part of a global push to confront a disease that has quietly embedded itself into the country's medical landscape. The walk was followed by a symposium that brought together doctors, medical faculty, students, and community members to grapple with a problem that Pakistan cannot ignore: the World Health Organization has classified the nation as a high-burden country for hepatitis, and the reasons are both systemic and urgent.
The gathering heard a stark assessment from Dr. Zaigham Abbas, who heads the Department of Hepato-Gastroenterology and Liver Transplant at the hospital. Unsafe medical practices and quackery, he explained, are actively spreading hepatitis B and C, along with AIDS, through the community. This is not a matter of individual negligence but of structural failure. The national policies designed to prevent this transmission are not working. Weak enforcement, poor governance, the proliferation of informal healthcare providers operating outside regulatory oversight, and chronic resource shortages have created an environment where the disease spreads unchecked.
Dr. Khurram Baqai presented the epidemiological picture—the numbers and patterns that show how deeply hepatitis has penetrated Pakistani society. The scale of the problem became clearer as the symposium progressed. Dr. Zeeshan Hyder, a liver transplantation surgeon at the hospital, noted that chronic viral hepatitis has become the leading reason patients arrive at his operating table needing a new liver. This is not a theoretical concern. These are people whose bodies have been damaged beyond repair, whose only hope lies in finding a donor organ.
Prevention emerged as the central theme, though it is a prevention that requires both individual action and systemic change. Dr. Darayus P. Gazder discussed immunization as a cornerstone of hepatitis elimination—vaccines that work, that are proven, but that require reliable supply chains and equitable access. Prof. S. M. Wasim Jafri, Founding President of the Pakistan Society for the Study of Liver Diseases, brought the symposium toward its conclusion by naming the four pillars that must hold: vaccination programs that reach the population, healthcare practices that are genuinely safe, early diagnosis so that disease is caught before it becomes irreversible, and timely treatment that people can actually access.
What emerged from the day was not a sense of crisis overcome but of crisis acknowledged. Dr. Ziauddin Hospital reaffirmed its commitment to advancing medical education and supporting both national and global efforts to eliminate viral hepatitis. But the hospital alone cannot solve what governance, enforcement, and resource allocation have failed to solve. The question now is whether Pakistan's policymakers will treat this as the public health emergency it is, or whether the awareness walk will fade into memory while unsafe practices continue to spread disease through communities that have few defenses against them.
Citas Notables
Unsafe medical practices and quackery are spreading hepatitis B, C, and AIDS in the community— Dr. Zaigham Abbas, Head of Hepato-Gastroenterology and Liver Transplant
Vaccination, safe healthcare practices, early diagnosis, and timely treatment are critical to reducing hepatitis burden— Prof. S. M. Wasim Jafri, Founding President of Pakistan Society for the Study of Liver Diseases
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