Khost yet to receive ventilators from Kabul

KABUL (MoPH) has given no ventilator so far to southeastern Khost province, local officials said on Thursday.

The MoPH has registered five ventilators for hospitals in Khost, but local officials say they have only two ventilators donated by the Khost Medical Association.

 After a Pajhwok report about the smuggling of 32 ventilators to Pakistan, deputy public health minister Shafique Shahim told a press conference that 225 ventilators existed in hospitals nationwide.

He said the ministry had shared the list of 225 ventilators with the media and the Presidential Palace.

The list includes five ventilators for Khost province.  But Khost public health director Habib Shah Ansari told Pajhwok that they had so far received no ventilators from the Ministry of Public Health.

He said the provincial public health department had only two ventilators which they had received in donation.

Head of the medical association, Kaptan said they donated two ventilators to the Khost civil hospital soon after the outbreak of coronavirus in the country.

He said the association purchased the two ventilators, now out of order, and donated them to the public health department.  The ventilator cost $30,000.

Yesterday, acting Public Health Minister Ahmad Jawad Osmani published on his twitter account a list of countries and organizations who donated ventilators to Afghanistan.

The list shows Afghanistan has so far received 54 ventilators in aid including eight from the World Health Organization 10 from Turkey, seven from Qatar and two from Iran.

 However, the minister did not name countries and organizations who provided 26 ventilators in the list.

But an earlier Pajhwok report quoted MoPH spokesman Akmal Samsoor as saying that China donated four ventilators, Turkey three, Iran three and the World Health Organization provided 28 ventilators to the country.

Without elaborating, he said the ministry previously had 270 ventilators, but 40 of them were out of order.

Khost provincial council chairman Kafil Rehan also said the health ministry had so far supplied no ventilator to the province as far as he knew.

ma

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