Injected With Neglect: How Pakistan’s Healthcare System Is Fueling An HIV Crisis |
Mohammed Amin was eight years old when he came home from a routine hospital visit with a fever. Days later, he tested positive for HIV. His sister Asma tested positive shortly after. Their family had one explanation: the syringe used to inject Mohammed at THQ Hospital Taunsa had been used on other children before him, one of whom was already living with the virus. Mohammed died before his ninth birthday.
His story is not singular. It is a pattern. Between November 2024 and October 2025, at least 331 children in the Punjab city of Taunsa tested positive for HIV. In more than half the cases, investigators recorded “contaminated needle” as the likely mode of transmission. A year before that, over 30 dialysis patients at Nishtar Hospital in Multan, south Punjab’s largest public medical facility, contracted HIV due to what a government probe described as “scandalous negligence.”
And six years before that, the city of Larkana in Sindh watched as 876 people, 82 percent of them children, were diagnosed with HIV in the space of three months through unsafe medical injections. These are not accidents. They are the predictable consequence of a state that has consistently failed to enforce the most basic standards of medical safety.
Pakistan’s HIV outbreaks are not medical anomalies. They are human rights violations: foreseeable, preventable, and repeating. Under international law, the state bears an obligation to ensure that its healthcare infrastructure does not become a site of harm. That obligation is going unmet. This is the story of how Pakistan’s public health system turned the act of seeking care into a vector of catastrophe.
The scale of what happened in Larkana was, at the time, almost impossible to comprehend. A WHO-led investigation in 2024 found that 99 percent of the HIV-positive children had received a medical injection or intravenous infusion within the previous 12 months. Field teams visiting clinics documented direct and indirect reuse of syringes and drip sets, unsafe disposal of sharps, and the repackaging of used syringes for resale to doctors. In Sindh province alone, investigators identified over 500 clinics, laboratories, and blood banks with unsafe practices or evidence of medical quackery.
The first HIV-positive case had been reported internally as early as 26 October 2024, and was suppressed by senior management until a patient’s death forced the issue into the open
The first........