Bibliographic record
Abstract
Routine reuse of syringes in Pakistan's back-street health centres has caused a surge in bid-borne infections such as hepatitis B and C. which experts have dubbed "the AIDS of Pakistan'.But to solve this problem, Pakistan must first wean itself off injections.Khabir Ahmad rexwts.Gravediggers in one of Asia's oldest and largest graveyards, situated in Pakistan's fertile Charsadda district, are busy preparing yet another grave.This time.the grave is for a 41 -year-old science teacher who died of complications of hepatitis C-a virus whose rates have surged in Pakistan during the past decade, along with hepatitis ii.The dead man's home village of Gulabad is gripped by constant fear.wondering who's turn vill be next.At least one person in each household is infected with hepatitis B or Csome even have both.More than 15 people.mostly in their early 50s.have died of complications of these infections during the past 5 years.The situation is similar else-where in Pakistan.which several experts warn is fast becoming "a cirrhotic state"."For decades, middle-aged people in this area (Charsadda] died mainly as a result of family feuds and enmity; now many of them arc dying because of Zyaray (Jaund ice), heart attacks and accidents", says I lasan Khan, a 55-year-old gravedigger from Charsadda Khas whose family has been in the trade for centuries, and who claims to have buried thousands of people over his 41-year career.Mohammad I Iumayun.a consultant physician at Khyber Teaching I lospital -a large tertiary-care hospital in Peshawar that also caters for Charsadda.rcvealsthat around a quarter of medical unit beds in the hospital arc taken up by patients with complications of hepatitis B or C. most of whom have chronic liver diseases.The numbers of such patients arc steadily increasing, taking vital re-sources away from other medical conditions in a country where public hospitals are already underresourced and over-stretched.Although nationwide data on the prevalence of hl(xKIborne infc(ions is lacking, it is estimated that 5-8% and 7-1O'f people in the country are suffering from hepatitis B and C, respectively.Ixperts have dubbed the two infections "the Ill V/AIDS of Pakistan" and warn that loss of pftxluctivity due to illness, deaths, and care-giving (at home as well as in hospitals) is worsening the poverty situation, which is already dire with 3O-4O of people living o less than US$1 a day.The recommended treatment for chronic viral infection is so expensive that many patients cannot afford to use it.They and their families are forced to resort to selling their animals.jewellery.and land to buy inter-feron injections.Equally worrying is the growing number of "hepatitis or-phans".Each person who dies from these infections leaves behind, on average, five impoverished children for whom no social and government support exists.But.argues Naveed Zafar Janjua (Aga Khan University.Karachi), hepatitis deaths and their associated socioeconomic problems could largely be avoided by promotion of safe injection practices and by avoiding unnecessary injections.He estimates that over 1.5 billion injccons (13.6 injections per person).including 53.6 million for immunisation purposes.are administered in Pakistan each year.and that % of these are unnecessary.Behind these alarmingly high injecuon rates is a belief among many Pakistanis that this delivery method is the most powerful, the best and the quickest way to administer medicine, explains Janjua.And most of the people who opt for injections arc unaware of the risk associated with their use.Educating the public axut these risks might help reduce some of the excess but, says Aamir Javed Khan of Safe Injection Global Network (SIGN), Pakistan, the main drivers behind the high injection rates are
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".