In the face of increasing cases of mortality due to infectious diseases, public health experts have urged the policy makers to chalk out a comprehensive strategy to check the spread of communicable diseases through focusing on public awareness on large scale.
They also called for encouraging public-private partnership so that reliance on costly products could be checked.
Nevertheless, the ratio of communicable diseases is very high in poor and developing countries where one of every two deaths is result of infectious diseases.
According to them, the increasing mortality due to infectious diseases should be a matter of grave concern for the health professionals as well as policy makers, hence dedicated efforts are required to be made to check it.
"Infectious diseases cause 13 million deaths world-wide every year. In the developing countries the situation is most alarming, as the infectious diseases caused one in every two deaths. Nevertheless, infectious diseases have emerged as the world's biggest threat to the health of children and adults.
In Pakistan, about 30 percent of all the mortality recorded by the hospitals were attributed to infectious diseases," they stated.
The experts including Professor Dr Aamir Nazir, Dr Sheema Khan and Dr Amir Mirza stated that there is re-emergence of malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, diarrhoea and other preventable diseases, while no efforts seems to have been made to check the diseases. "Only a well-planned health policy and its strict implementation at all levels can deal with such a bleak health scenario.
This should not prove to be very difficult for the policymakers to devise an appropriate health policy in the presence of World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations and several role models in the developed and developing countries," they said.
They stated that Pakistan ranks 8th among the 22 states with highest burden of Tuberculosis (TB) in the world. Smoking is major cause of developing Tuberculosis.
"It is horrifying to note that smoking is killing 1 in 10 adults daily and the figure would reach over 10 million deaths per annum by the year 2030," they said.
After alcohol, smoking is rated as the second largest cause of death world-wide, adding that the need is to check the menace of smoking by imposing complete ban on manufacturing of cigarettes, they asserted.