The department treats children up to 18, trains the next generation of paediatricians, and runs community-based research across Pakistan — much of it in the low-income settlements around Karachi and in remote regions to the north. This issue collects what that work produced over January and February: in the clinic, in the field, and at meetings from Islamabad to Banff.
In Pakistan’s remote north — Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral, mountain regions where a mother may be hours from a hospital — most newborn deaths come from a short list of causes that simple, low-cost care can prevent: infection, breathing trouble at birth, and the dangers of being born too small or too early. Foundations for Health and Empowerment (F4HE) is a programme that tests whether such care can be delivered at the community level in those conditions.
In early February its partners met in Lisbon to compare results. Dr Shabina Ariff, who leads the department’s newborn-health work, presented the interventions trialled in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral; Prof Dr Sajid Soofi reported on the wider programme; and Dr Aminha Jahangir of Aga Khan Foundation Canada spoke on women’s health, including cervical and breast cancer screening. The partners come from across the Aga Khan Development Network — the family of agencies, spanning health, education and rural support, that the University belongs to.
Vaccination programmes tend to report their own coverage, and those self-counts can run high. A third-party survey checks the claim independently, by going to households and asking. Dr Shabina Ariff oversaw the training of the master trainers for Round 3 of Pakistan’s Third-Party Verification Immunization Coverage Survey (TPVICS): trainers from every province gathered in Islamabad to standardise the method and the tablet-based data collection before fanning out to do the counting.
Professor Fyezah Jehan heads the department. Her research asks a deceptively simple question — why do mothers and newborns get sick in low-resource settings, and what stops it — and has pursued it across pneumonia, the leading infectious killer of young children, and the infections newborns acquire in their first days. She established Pakistan’s first large research platform dedicated to pregnancy and newborn health, the kind of long-running study that lets findings accumulate rather than arrive one paper at a time. In 2024 a Stanford ranking placed her among the most-cited 2% of scientists worldwide.
On accelerating maternal and newborn health at the International Maternal and Newborn Health Conference in Nairobi; chairing a session on climate-sensitive disease at AKU’s National Health Sciences Research Symposium; on the paediatric “chain of survival” — the linked steps from first responder to hospital that determine whether a critically ill child lives — at a conference in Karachi; and on a panel, organised by Nutrition International, on cutting deaths from childhood diarrhoea.
On 2 February the department reviewed its research for the year. The totals below are a measure of its scale: grants currently funded and their combined value, papers published in 2025, and the people employed on research across the country.
Of those grants, 22 were won in 2025 alone, worth a further USD 25.98 million.
Iron makes haemoglobin, the molecule that carries oxygen in the blood. When a pregnant woman runs short of iron, her haemoglobin falls — and that leaves her less able to withstand the blood loss of delivery. Severe bleeding after birth, postpartum haemorrhage, is a leading cause of maternal death in Pakistan, and anaemia makes it deadlier. Iron given intravenously rebuilds haemoglobin faster than tablets, which matters most late in pregnancy when there is little time left. The department has been using this approach across its field sites.
A new agreement with SHINE Humanity — a non-profit that runs primary care in underserved Pakistani communities — pools SHINE’s frontline clinical data with the department’s capacity to analyse it, so the question of who benefits, and by how much, can be answered with evidence rather than assumption.
It is straightforward to count whether a child lives. It is much harder to measure whether a child is developing well — learning, moving, communicating on schedule — yet that is what determines a life. With the World Health Organization, the department hosted a seminar on the Global Scales for Early Development (GSED), a WHO tool that produces a single “D-score” for a child’s development from birth to age three. Pakistan is among the first three countries to validate it at scale, and it is now available in Urdu and Sindhi for community health workers.
“What gets measured gets managed.”— Dr Salim Virani, on why a development score matters
Researchers from LUMS, a university in Lahore, visited to discuss applying artificial intelligence to the department’s data. That data comes from several long-running studies based at the Karachi field sites — cohorts that have followed thousands of pregnancies and births — and a field visit to Bhains Colony, one of those sites, grounded the discussion in where the numbers actually come from. The aim is to use that data to predict risk earlier in mothers and children.
The bacteria that colonise the gut in the first days of life shape immunity and growth. Dr Waqasuddin Khan presented work from the department on the link between a mother’s gut bacteria after childbirth and premature birth in low-resource settings — a poster at the Keystone Symposia on the human microbiome, held in Banff, Canada, in January.
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the commonest reason infants are hospitalised with breathing illness; in 2024 the WHO first recommended protecting them through maternal vaccination or antibodies given to newborns. At the RSV research network’s conference in Rome, the department’s MIRNA team presented on vaccine demand and disease burden, and Dr Imran Nisar joined a panel on vaccine hesitancy. At home, Dr Nisar, Dr Ali Faisal Saleem and Dr Farah Qamar led sessions on antimicrobial resistance — the growing problem of bacteria that no longer respond to antibiotics. And research by Dr Hamna Ameen examined Group B Streptococcus, a bacterium that can pass from mother to baby during labour and cause stillbirth and newborn death, making the case for maternal immunisation.
When a critically ill child’s kidneys fail, or fluids and salts swing dangerously out of balance, ordinary dialysis can be too abrupt for an unstable body to tolerate. Continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) does the same job slowly and continuously, around the clock — gentler, but unforgiving of error, since the doses are calculated by weight and small mistakes carry real risk. Karachi hosted the paediatric nephrology conference, returning after sixteen years and led by Dr Arshalooz Jamila Rahman, with workshops that put clinicians in front of the actual CRRT machines and lines rather than slides — because the equipment only helps if the team is confident using it.
Epilepsy is common in children and heavily stigmatised, which keeps families from seeking care. For International Epilepsy Day the courtyard filled with stalls on seizure first aid, medication and diet, with the neurology team answering questions in the open. Organised by Dr Shahnaz Ibrahim and Dr Mohammad Raza.
Specialist paediatric neurology is concentrated in big-city hospitals, so families elsewhere travel far for it. A camp at the Aga Khan Maternal & Child Care Centre in Hyderabad brought epilepsy awareness and consultations to children closer to home, run by the AKUH Karachi team.
“I feel proud. Sometimes I feel tired too. But I love them exactly as they are.”— A child in Sibshops, a programme for the brothers and sisters of children with autism
Why charting the pattern of a child’s fevers often settles the diagnosis.
Watch → Dr Fatima Mir · Infectious diseaseThe chest-X-ray clues that should make a clinician think twice.
Watch → Dr Ali Faisal Saleem · ImmunologyHow the BCG vaccine works, and how to handle catch-up schedules.
Watch → Dr Ali Faisal Saleem · PodcastWhy prevention matters year-round in one of the worst-hit countries.
Listen → CRRT workshopGetting familiar with the machines, lines and everyday troubleshooting.
Watch → Dr Vina Tresa · NephrologyNot only for kidney failure: fluid overload, electrolyte crises and more.
Watch → Dr Naveed Siddiqui · Intensive careWhy sodium targets matter when a child has cerebral oedema.
Watch → Dr Kishwar Enam · Child protectionIn Pakistan, abuse needn’t be reported — so hospitals need systems.
Watch → SimulationWorking a suspected-abuse case in real time, step by step.
Watch → Dr Arshalooz RahmanHow small signs become reliable clues over a career of watching.
Watch → Case-basedTelling two common skin infections apart, and treating them in time.
Watch → RSVA long ICU stay, and the case for protecting infants from the virus.
Watch → MicrobiomeEarly colonisation by drug-resistant E. coli, and what it costs growth.
Watch → SibshopsA support group for the siblings of children with autism.
Watch →Paediatric endocrinology deals with hormones and growth in children — diabetes, thyroid disorders, problems of puberty and short stature. Professor Khadija Nuzhat Humayun, who trained at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, now leads that section at AKU and runs its accredited fellowship, the training route by which Pakistan produces its own paediatric endocrinologists.
General paediatrics is the front door of the department — the everyday care of children that sorts the routine from the serious. Dr Danish Abdul Aziz, who helped build the residency programme into the first in South Asia accredited by ACGME-International (the US body that sets standards for medical training), now leads the section.
The department welcomes Dr Nida Yazdani, Dr Mahnoor Tariq and Ms Kaniz Farwa Haider as research instructors; Dr Fayaz Ahmad as senior instructor in neonatology, the care of newborns; and Dr Abhishek Lal as a research instructor.
Two people who make the rest possible: Saima Ejaz, who runs ethics and research administration, completed a Master of Health Policy and Management at AKU; and Waqar Asghar built much of the structure behind the residency programme — the quality systems that ACGME-International recognised when it named AKU the first institution in South Asia to meet some of its standards.
We are saddened by the passing of Mr Syed Ehsanur Rahman, father of Dr Zaubina Kazi, senior instructor in the department, on 4 January 2026. Our thoughts are with Dr Kazi and her family.
Condolences may be sent to zaubina.kazi@aku.edu