25.🩺👩🏻⚕️Dow Medical College- 2024. Amateur Artist. Cricket. Poetry. History. Current Affairs. Instructor @FRIPakistan. Interests: Cardiology, Public health
After my brother Mashal Khan’s lynching, my education was stopped for a year, but my dreams could not be silenced.
Journalism was Mashal’s passion. I promised to continue the journey he couldn’t finish.
Today, I graduate in Journalism. A promise made, a promise fulfilled. ❤️
Nothing is important right now than heatwave in Sindh. Not even global war. The temp might rise to 50c and Karachi being an "asphalt zone" can only contribute to god forbid deaths of working class. Lyari has 20 hours load shedding & inhumanely congested. Who will be responsible?
This is "Mãozinha do Amor" (Little Hand of Love / Hands of Love).
There are moments in medical practice when the most powerful interventions come not from technology, but from a heathcare worker who refuses to accept that a problem has no solution.
During COVID-19, cold and poorly perfused hands were defeating pulse oximeters at the exact moments when SpO₂( oxygen saturation) readings mattered the most. Every workaround fell short, until Nurse Lidiane de Souza Melo in Rio de Janeiro filled surgical gloves with warm water and wrapped them around a patient's hand. The oximeter responded. The reading appeared.
And something else happened too. The patient, alone, frightened, intubated, sealed off from every familiar face, felt the weight and warmth of something that resembled a hand holding theirs.
The technique spread across Brazilian hospitals and then the world, because it solved two problems at once: a measurement problem that was compromising care, and a human problem that no protocol had ever tried to address. Two gloves. Warm water. No budget required.
Those of us who lived through those shifts understand what it meant to work inside full PPE, unable to offer a hand or a recognizable expression of reassurance. Mãozinha do Amor was a quiet refusal to accept that helplessness as inevitable.
A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.
It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.
Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.
Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.
The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.
It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.
The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.
When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.
I don't think AI will ever replace doctors. But it will make our work much easier.
I don't see AI managing a PPH due to a cervical tear at 3am in a health center 4 with no blood products.
When Allah is accepting duas of Laylatul Qadr, may your be one of them. When he is forgiving people, may you be one of them. When he is showering his mercy down, may it be you that it lands on. And when you meet your friends and family in Jannah, may I be one of them, Ameen.