Sixth Health and Nutrition Survey Underway
14 medical societies join hands with DoH, FNRI to assess health conditions
Look around. See, and not glance away at the faces of our youth: their features express the condition of their lives.
On the streets, they run and play deprived of proper and adequate sustenance.
Take a closer look. Make a tour of school campuses, particularly the private ones, and you see a different kind of face: overweight or obese children slurping their favorite calorie-rich but zero-nutrient beverage.
Get to know these kids, and find out how fond they are of sitting in front of the television-rejecting sports and games as too taxing, and eating out at fast-food centers. Some of them, if you get them to admit or catch them at it, already smoke.
There was a time when we thought cardiovascular diseases and stroke hit only adults. No more. Because of poor lifestyle choices, these kids, even as young as two, already know what it feels like to be hypertensive with hardening arteries.
These two faces seen in our youth and also in their elders express two ends of a spectrum. The faces may look away from each other but both head towards ailments and diseases that could have been prevented if only the owners of these faces were fed enough and fed right.
But how to make sure of this, the government, with the help of the private sector, intends to work on.
The government, to set up health policies and programs for the prevention and control of lifestyle- and nutrition-related diseases, and the private sector, to help determine the prevalence and magnitude of these diseases, as well as the conditions that make one prone to such illnesses-on which the policies and programs will be based.
The National Nutrition and Health Survey: 2003 (NNHeS: 2003) embodies all these goals. It is the sixth in the series of nationwide studies first conducted in 1978 by the Department of Health (DoH) and the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) on the nutrition and health conditions of our people.
This year, 14 medical societies join hands with the government to expand the scope of the study, which will be conducted among Filipinos ages two and above. The DoH, FNRI-DOST, and the multisectoral task force signed the memorandum of agreement last July 15.
Philippine Lipid Society (PLS) president and NNHeS: 2003 overall project coordinator Dante Morales said the survey will cover the following diseases: heart attack, enlarged heart, arrhythmia, diseases of blood vessels to the legs, chronic kidney disease, risk for kidney stones, high uric acid, abnormal urine with blood, pus cells and protein, dementia (senility), migraine, Parkinson's Disease, muscle and bone diseases, osteoporosis, asthma, and food allergies. "Even the pervasiveness of bangungot will be determined," he added.
The need for a survey was pointed out by FNRI director Corazon Barba. "It is very important that we have baseline data on all the different [health] problems in the country, so that we will be able to come up with the appropriate intervention... Part of solving the problem is really knowing what the problem is," she said.
Assistant health secretary Rolando Enrique Domingo said the results of the study will be very useful for the department, as they will be the basis of future health programs, legislation, budget, and resource allocation.
Aside from Morales, Domingo, and Barba, the other principal signatories of the MOA were: Philippine Heart Association (PHA) president Romeo Santos, PHA secretary Mariano Lopez, Philippine Society of Hypertension (PSH) president Esperanza Cabral, and Philippine Diabetes Association (PDA) president Rosa Allyn Sy.
They said that the steering committee composed of the FNRI-DOST, DoH, PLS, PSH, PDA, and PHA will be supported by various medical societies. These are the Philippine Pediatric Society, Philippine Society of Nephrology, Philippine Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Osteoporosis Society of the Philippines Foundation, Philippine Association for the Study of Overweight and Obesity, Philippine Neurological Association, and Philippine Rheumatology Association.
The Philippine College of Physicians, Philippine Society of Gastroenterology, and Philippine Society of Asthma, Allergy, and Immunology will also participate in the survey.
NNHeS, which commenced on July 23, will last for two years. However, Barba hopes that prevalence data for some of the diseases would be available when the nation marks nutrition month July next year. Michelle Ciriacruz
|
