NEARLY 900 children in the small Pakistani city of Ratodero were bedridden early this year with raging fevers that resisted treatment.

Parents were frantic, with everyone seeming to know a family with a sick child, The New York Times reported yesterday.

The city was the epicenter of an HIV outbreak that overwhelmingly affected children in April. Health officials initially blamed the outbreak on a single pediatrician, saying he was reusing syringes. Since then, about 1,100 citizens have tested positive for the virus, or one in every 200 residents. Almost 900 are younger than 12. Health officials believe the real numbers are probably much higher, as only a fraction of the population has been tested so far.

Five months on, the panic of the outbreak still hangs over Ratodero. Doctors and paramedics are struggling to cope with the number of HIV-positive patients, while residents are still lining up to be tested.

Gulbahar Shaikh, the local journalist who broke the news of the epidemic to residents of his city in April, watched as his neighbors and relatives rushed to clinics to line up and test for the virus.

When officials descended on Ratodero to investigate, they discovered that many of the infected children had gone to the same pediatrician, Muzaffar Ghanghro, who served the city’s poorest families.

Shaikh panicked — that was his children’s pediatrician. He rushed his family to be tested, and his 2-year-old daughter was confirmed to have the virus, which is the cause of AIDS.

“It was devastating,” said Shaikh, a 44-year-old television journalist in Ratodero, a city of 200,000. Health officials now say that Ghanghro is unlikely to be the sole cause of the outbreak. Visiting health workers saw many cases of doctors reusing syringes and IV needles.

From 2010 to 2018, the number of HIV-positive people in Pakistan nearly doubled, to about 160,000, according to estimates by UNAIDS, the United Nations task force that specializes in HIV and AIDS.

(SD-Agencies)