Abstract
World is facing the largest refugee crisis of its time due to continuously outgoing wars, conflicts and natural disasters. One of the important aspects of refugees and migrants is health. Till date, no comprehensive data was available related to health status of Afghan refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Pakistan. Here, we present health status for Afghan refugees for last seven years and for IDPs for 2–4 years. For Afghan refugees the data was provided by Commissionerate Afghan Refugee (CAR), Pakistan, whereas data for IDPs was collected from hospitals and Basic health units (BHUs) of different districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa namely Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan and Bannu. Highest number of Afghan refugee's deaths occurred due to cardiovascular problems. Most prevalent reported infections were respiratory tract infections (48.05%). Skin diseases and Diarrhea collectively affected 21.08% of Afghan refugees. Overall, disease burden was more in females than males in Afghan refugee's population. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive report on health and disease status of Afghan refugees and IDPs in Pakistan.
Highlights
Pakistan is a developing country, holding sixth largest population in the world with a number reaching ∼208 million according to a recent census conducted by Pakistan Bureau of Statistics [1]
65% of Pakistani population is residing in rural areas where health, hygiene and sanitation conditions are not very good compared to urban areas
The main objective of this report was to collect the data and evaluate the disease status of the afghan refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Pakistan based on the data collected from different areas/hospitals, government institutes within Pakistan and from online data available from January 2012 to December 2018
Summary
Pakistan is a developing country, holding sixth largest population in the world with a number reaching ∼208 million according to a recent census conducted by Pakistan Bureau of Statistics [1]. 65% of Pakistani population is residing in rural areas where health, hygiene and sanitation conditions are not very good compared to urban areas. These factors make the residing population at risk of various infections and diseases. In most cases, the camps arranged by the government for living of refugees lie in outskirts of urban areas. This increases the burden of already populated rural areas and incidence of diseases increases. Movement of people from one place to other serves as a source of dispersal of infections to new areas, where previously those infections were absent or less prevalent
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