DOH steps up fight versus dengue
The Department of Health (DOH) has launched its counteroffensive in the continuing war against dengue, and the war zone has now spread to vacant lots and empty houses where the Aedes aegypti mosquito may thrive and breed. To-DOH Laban sa Dengue, which was launched nationwide in February, is the Health department's preemptive strike against this disease, especially now that dengue is a "year-round threat." At the launch held in CARAGA, Health secretary Francisco Duque III said: "Because of rising temperatures and the unpredictable weather that brings rain [during] the normally dry and warm months of the year … there are already many reported dengue cases this early in 2008." Duque encouraged local government officials to expand their search-and-destroy operations against the Aedes aegypti mosquito and its larvae. He explained: "It is useless for one household to participate in our aggressive sanitation drive and vector control when the house next to them is harboring mosquitoes. In the end, dengue prevention is about community action and we need the local governments to help us with this." Duque commended the public for showing "heightened awareness" on dengue. This, he said, "makes them suspicious of any symptom closely associated with dengue," thus making them seek medical attention immediately. As part of the drive against dengue, the DOH recently provided the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) with PhP2.5 million to purchase reagents needed for surveillance. Duque said these reagents will enable doctors quickly identify real dengue cases. The reagents will also help epidemiologists identify which strain of the dengue virus is circulating in a particular community. The objectives of this procedure, said Duque, include identifying suspect cases and fully investigate them during routine surveillance and disease outbreaks. The procedure will be particularly helpful in times when there are many reports of clustering of dengue cases, which may indicate that there is a high probability of an outbreak in the area where the dengue cases are clustered. He explained: "With the availability of reagents, RITM can run hundreds of samples per day and make the results available within 24 hours.… In other words, this is going to be a big help in confirming cases before declaring if there is an outbreak or none." Duque also disclosed that the DOH has established a "Dengue War Room" at the National Epidemiology Center (NEC). He said: "This war room is going to be the DOH's dengue operation center where all reports of dengue cases nationwide, be it sporadic or clustering, will be collected and analyzed. This war room will help us identify the area where the next possible outbreak will take place." A. Anonas
WASHINGTON Eleven Asian nations facing the biggest threat from tuberculosis risk being saddled with a whopping trillion-dollar economic burden over the next 10 years if they do not beef up their anti-TB strategy, a landmark study shows. Led by China and India, the countries are already implementing a prevention and treatment strategy, popularly known as DOTS (directly observed therapy, short course) introduced by the World Health Organization in the 1990s. But the DOTS strategy was not sufficient to reduce the incidence of the disease, particularly in HIV-infected people and due to drug resistance, and had to be restructured. A World Bank study released in December for the first time captured the economic benefits of extending the revamped DOTS strategy as proposed in the organization's Global Plan to Stop TB covering the 2006-2015 period. The research covered 22 "high-burden" tuberculosis-endemic countries, including China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Vietnam. "These Asian nations have to grapple with a US$1.17-trillion economic cost over a 10-year period if TB prevention and control are sustained at current levels of treatment," said Ramanan Laxminarayan, an economist who led the study. "But if they embrace WHO's global plan they could collectively save about US$10 billion each year or US$100 billion during the 10-year period," he said. "However, the costs of the global plan may be greater than these benefits in some countries." TB is the leading infectious killer of adults in Asia. The worst affected nations are China, India, and Indonesia. "This important new study shows us why TB control is a smart investment in lasting development for low-and middle-income countries," said Joy Phumaphi, World Bank vice president for human development. "This economic justification for TB control strengthens the case for governments and donors to sharply reduce TB prevalence and deaths in the name of better health and higher incomes for people living at grave risk of TB illness and death," Phumaphi said. The economic impact of TB deaths and the benefits of TB control among the 22 high-burden countries are greatest in China and India, where the combination of growing incomes and a relatively high number of TB deaths translates into a significant economic effect, the study showed. Laxminarayan pointed out that the 11 Asian nations accounted for one million of the 1.7 million deaths from TB in the 22 countries covered by the study, saying that extending DOTS coverage could slash mortality considerably. "Implementing the global plan has the potential of averting about 100,000 adult deaths per year," he said. "The burden of TB in Asia while not as large as in Africa is a serious threat to public health," added Laxminarayan, who works with Resources for the Future, a Washington-based not-for-profit research group. WHO and World Bank experts were also involved in the study, commissioned by the Washington-based bank on behalf of the Stop TB Partnership and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charity of software tycoon Bill Gates and his wife. The study entitled The Economic Benefit of Global Investments in Tuberculosis has attracted considerable interest from international health and development agencies, along with research and civil-society groups, bank officials said. P. Parameswaran, AFP
GENEVA The United Nations Children's Fund said that developing countries must play an active role alongside global partnerships to further cut child mortality and raise overall care. UNICEF noted in its State of the World's Children Report 2008 that awareness of child mortality and other global health issues is at an all time high thanks to the efforts of new public-private initiatives such as the GAVI alliance that promotes vaccinations, and the Roll Back Malaria campaign. However, "it has been argued that global partnerships are often donor- and commodity-driven rather than country- and people-centered," the report said. "A frequent focus on single diseases has sometimes meant an over-reliance on vertical interventions and insufficient emphasis on integrating services and strengthening national health systems." The report urged developing countries to take the lead and "own" the solutions to their health problems, saying this must involve tackling discrimination against poor people and women in particular. Noted the report: "In far too many countries, to be poor automatically means to be neglected and marginalized by the health system. Others are excluded from essential services and practices on the grounds of gender, disability, race or ethnic origin." Health programs must be integrated into strategies and policies that tackle the root causes of discrimination and exclusion, it said. The UN agency announced in December that child mortality rates are at an all time low, with the number of children dying before their fifth birthday falling below the 10 million mark in 2006. It also estimates though that more than 500,000 women still die every year as a result of complications during pregnancy and childbirth, with about half of these deaths taking place in sub-Saharan Africa. Much more needs to be done to cut these deaths, and the new report highlights four simple measures that can easily be adopted and promoted: exclusive breast-feeding, immunization, insecticide-treated bed nets, and vitamin-A supplements. These measures are likely to have a "marked impact on child and maternal survival outcomes in the coming years," the report said. "Community-level integration of essential services for mothers, newborns and young children, and sustainable improvements in national health systems can save the lives of many of the more than 26,000 children under five who die each day," UNICEF executive director Ann Veneman said. To this end, health care should be tailored to the needs of individual patients and treat them as active participants in their own treatment rather than just passive recipients. "Empowering individuals to assume a measure of responsibility for their own health-and that of their families-can have a profound and lasting impact on development," the report said. W. French, AFP |
