At first glance, the Changan Karvaan parked outside one of Aga Khan University’s (AKU) field sites in Karachi’s Bhains Colony looks like an ordinary white minivan. Boxy, tinted windows, no markings to set it apart. It’s only when you get in that the disinfectant and medical equipment give it away.

Under the bright clinical lights, you will find surgical gloves, syringes, tissue covers… everything needed to perform MITS, or minimally invasive tissue sampling, on even the smallest of babies in the localities of Ali Akbar Shah, Ibrahim Hyderi and Bhains Colony.

This unusual approach to forensics has helped researchers paint one of the clearest pictures yet of why these babies die before their fifth birthday.

In three of Karachi’s poorest neighbourhoods, a minimally invasive autopsy technique is doing what verbal accounts and hospital records couldn’t: naming the exact cause of death in babies before age five

In three of Karachi’s poorest neighbourhoods, a minimally invasive autopsy technique is doing what verbal accounts and hospital records couldn’t: naming the exact cause of death in babies before age five

In 2015, the Gates Foundation launched the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) programme to better understand why babies and young children die in poor countries.

It was coordinated by University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Centre and aimed to combine clinical records, laboratory testing, verbal autopsies and, where families consent, MITS, to pinpoint the biological causes of stillbirths and deaths among children under five.

MITS is a post-mortem exam in which tiny amounts of tissue and fluid from key organs are taken using fine needles. These samples are analysed for pathogens, infectious disease and malignant tumours. The results reveal the exact cause of death without a full surgical autopsy.

The goal is to arm governments and health agencies with evidence, so they can tackle preventable child deaths. “Children die because of certain reasons — there’s intrauterine deaths, which are before birth,” says Dr Asim Beg, parasitologist at AKU who specialises in vector-borne diseases. “The real cause for those is also........

© Dawn (Magazines)