Ligtas Tigdas 2004 Begins February
After successfully leading the campaign to eliminate polio from the country, the Department of Health aims to replicate the feat, this time with measles, by 2008. To reach this goal the DOH will stage nationwide door-to-door vaccinations for the whole length of February next year. The project targets for immunization up to 26.5 million kids between nine months and 14 years.
Ligtas Tigdas 2004 is part of the Philippine Measles Elimination Campaign 1998-2008. This plan began with the first
Ligtas Tigdas in 1998. Although the implementation of the second major part of the campaign has been delayed for a year because of problems concerning the stock of vaccines, the program will proceed at the start of next year's measles season, with 66,000 health workers acting as project implementers.
Speaking at a forum organized by the DOH in November, health secretary Manuel Dayrit confidently said: "We are at a stage when we can eliminate measles." Since 1998, annual measles deaths in the country have gone down to between 150 and 350-a significant improvement from the 5,000 to 12,000 deaths in the 1980s.
While the incidence of measles in the country is declining, the disease still exacts a toll on the patients'-as well as their families'-lives and livelihoods. Every year direct expenses and losses to productivity resulting from the disease go as high as PhP90 million, and this is without counting the costs accreted over a patient's lifetime if the disease leads to permanent disability. And so this project, Dayrit said, hopes to address this burden.
The measles vaccines, a huge bulk of which is provided by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), are proven safe and effective. They are also inexpensive, coming down at PhP11.50 per dose.
Dayrit called on different sectors of society to contribute to the success of the campaign. Government agencies that will be directly involved in the implementation of the program-such as the Liga ng mga Barangay, the Department of Interior and Local Government, the Department of National Defense-have already issued memorandums to their members on their participation to the project.
J. P. de Guzman
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