After Musharraf's encounter with judiciary, another such encounter is rapidly on the anvil between the parliament and the medical profession. A nationwide indefinite strike of doctors is coming and don't forget that like the lawyers, their numbers also run in hundreds of thousands. The high handedness with which the joint committee of parliament on health and the Punjab administration has handled the purely technical cases of the deaths of the wife of Wasim Akram, MNA Faiz and a baby girl, has brought us to this situation. Established procedures and the law have not been followed in any of these cases. For example, in the case of Wasim Akram's wife, the inquiry committee of the Ministry of Health lacked the technical expertise and its eventual conclusion of fungal endocarditis is on an infirm basis, if not outright without basis, without a proper post mortem. Fact of the matter is that the Doctors' Hospital Lahore discharged the patient while she was still alive and the Apollo Hospital of India handed a death certificate. Add to this the fact that Wasim Akram himself acknowledges that deterioration occurred on the Emergency Air-Transport. Yet, Mr Akram is all praise for the Indian hospitals, as they did not charge him. Similarly in MNA Faiz's case, his own kin had made all arrangements at the Polyclinic Islamabad but the patient landed at PIMS and was expectedly put in a VIP ward, a slow tract in terms of medical efficiency even if it is high in social services credentials of the PIMS .It is noteworthy too that the hospital which had sent the MNA had earlier admitted him in CCU at Abbotabad. It appears the NWFP hospitals do not maintain fully-equipped ambulances with skilled staff that could transport the potentially serious patients like Mr Faiz. As for the little girl who died in Lahore, if the newspaper reports of administration of the injection Pavulon by mistake is correct, this is at least the third death in my 20 plus years career as a doctor when a look-alike injection has played a part in the death of a patient. The Ministry of Health is supposed to move to stop misleading labeling and allowing of same-sounding names in drug packaging. No one else can do their job for them. -DR M. I. SHAIKH, Islamabad, January 1.