Karachi Hospital HIV Outbreak

• Sindh Labour Minister Saeed Ghani has confirmed at least 78 children were infected with HIV/AIDS at Kulsoom Bai Valika Hospital, a SESSI facility in Karachi's SITE area run under the labour department.
• The petitioner who first raised the case, Tariq Mansoor, says the real toll is higher than 200 children, and that nine children have already died, with allegations that little was done in the roughly eight months since the deaths.
• The government and the petitioner disagree on the cause. The petitioner says the hospital reused contaminated syringes. Ghani disputes this, saying the hospital uses auto-disable syringes that "cannot be reused," which leaves the actual route of infection unresolved.
• Cases first surfaced in late October 2025. Ghani, who took the labour portfolio that September, says he ordered a fact-finding inquiry immediately; a committee was constituted on 29 October 2025, and multiple officials have since been suspended on its recommendations. A second inquiry was later ordered by the provincial ombudsman.
• The Sindh High Court has now stepped in, ordering the provincial health secretary and police chief to respond, and giving the Sindh government two weeks to submit a "comprehensive" report.
• Ghani says the gap between the official count and the petitioner's higher figure exists because some parents have not appeared before the inquiry committee. The Express Tribune reports the toll is still climbing.
• This is not Pakistan's first pediatric HIV outbreak tied to unsafe injection practices: in 2019, Ratodero in Sindh's Larkana district saw over 900 people, mostly children, infected after a doctor was found to be reusing syringes — a WHO Grade II emergency at the time.

Both sides agree children were infected with HIV at a public hospital in Karachi, and that the number is large. The fight is over how large, how it happened, and how long the government sat on it. The minister says 78, an inquiry is already moving, and the hospital's syringes could not have been the cause. The petitioner says the true count is past 200, nine children are already dead, and eight months passed with no real consequence. What settles this is not another official statement but the Sindh High Court's own two-week deadline, which is the loudest signal yet that the province's account has not been enough on its own. What the day-to-day coverage understates is the precedent: Sindh has done this before. Ratodero in 2019 was a WHO-declared emergency over the same failure, reused syringes infecting mostly small children, and the open question here is whether this is a new failure or the same one under a different hospital's name. On social platforms the story lives on YouTube, where Pakistani news channels' segments carry the accountability framing to tens of thousands of viewers; a 30-day Reddit probe found no on-topic citizen thread, so there is no organic citizen-framing layer yet.