Islamabad July 01,2026 (Daily Times): As contaminated floodwater gushed into their home in Buner, north-western Pakistan, Khalid (name changed) and his wife helped their three children up to higher ground. Amid the chaos, the couple had one more crucial thing to rescue: their life-saving HIV drugs.
They trudged through neck-deep water inside their home to save their antiretroviral treatment pills from being swept away, ignoring all other valuables.
“The waist-deep mud left behind by floodwaters had cut off our village for more than eight days,” Khalid recalls. “Thankfully, my wife and I still had our HIV medication with us,” says the daily wager, who contracted the virus while working abroad five years prior.
This happened last monsoon, in August 2025, when the skies opened on Pakistan, causing widespread flooding. Devastating riverine floods affected places like Buner, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Punjab province.
The floods claimed over a thousand lives, with 808 of these casualties reported in the two provinces alone. They displaced three million people and damaged nearly 230,000 houses.
For people living with HIV and Aids, their illness was an added risk factor.
During last year’s floods, many people with HIV got sick because they were cut off from antiretroviral therapy centres and couldn’t access drugs, Asma Nasim tells Dialogue Earth. Nasim is head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Sindh Institute for Urology and Transplantation.
In Pakistan, antiretroviral treatment for HIV/Aids is provided free of cost at dedicated centres.
Such therapy enables persons with HIV “to live healthy lives by suppressing the virus and preserving immune functions,” explains Asghar Ilyas Satti, national coordinator for the Association of People Living with HIV-Pakistan.
