PAKISTAN’S HIV surge is no longer a slow-burning public health concern. It is now a system failure unfolding in real time. What makes the crisis particularly alarming is not just the rising numbers — estimated at over 350,000 people living with the disease — but the profile of those newly infected. Increasingly, they are children and low-risk individuals, infected not through behaviour but through the healthcare system meant to protect them. Two converging failures are behind this trajectory. The first is the collapse of basic infection control across large parts of our healthcare network. The second is the persistence of syringe reuse, despite a........

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