GMA orders polio immunization drive

President Arroyo has ordered a large-scale polio immunization drive amid a health emergency a year after the Philippines declared itself free of the virus, Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit said yesterday.

Dayrit said the three separate cases monitored in Cagayan de Oro City and Cavite and Laguna provinces last year were from a "mutant strain" of the virus.

"We need to reach the 12 million target to eradicate the mutant polio strain," he added.

The wild strain of the virus was eliminated from the Philippines a year earlier, Dayrit said over dzBB radio.

Mrs. Arroyo has since issued a proclamation ordering the health department to administer oral vaccines to all children not more than five years old on Feb. 2-8 and on March 2-8, Dayrit said.

Poliomyelitis, or polio, is an acute viral disease caused by the polio virus. It is characterized by fever, motor paralysis, and atrophy of skeletal muscles, often leading to permanent disability and deformity.

Dayrit said the disease was acquired through contaminated food or water, and that toddlers were particularly vulnerable.

The World Health Office (WHO) regional office in Manila said the virus mutated because of a declining coverage of the government’s periodic nationwide vaccination campaigns.

The vaccines, given orally and for free over several doses, contain weakened virus to stimulate the production of human antibodies against the disease.

But if for some reason the complete program is not administered, the virus gets a chance to survive and mutate, said Dr. Sigrid Roesel, the polio program official for the WHO regional office in Manila.

"We agree with that," she told AFP when asked if she considered the new polio cases to be a national emergency.

"The mutated virus is circulating in the country and has paralyzed some children already," she said. "Without proper and immediate (control measures), it will continue to circulate and spread further in areas beyond the communities where it is right now."

Roesel said thousands of doctors, nurses, midwives and other medical workers and volunteers would be drafted for the campaign, which she said would cost around P256 million. Twenty WHO experts would be providing technical support, she added.

The vaccine givers would go "door to door" to try to achieve 100 percent coverage, Roesel said.

"For several reasons that the (government) has explained, immunization coverage in some parts of the country has gone down. Lots of children are not fully immune anymore," she noted.

The Philippine urban slums, where "a lot of people are living together in overcrowded places," have fallen out of the government program, either because residents did not have the time, were unaware of the immunization campaigns, or simply did not want to be immunized, Roesel said.

Over the past two years, the government has also suffered from "a shortage of vaccines because of some procurement problems," she said without elaborating.

The Philippines, along with 35 other countries and territories that make up the WHO’s Western Pacific region, was declared free of the wild polio virus in 2000.

The last wild polio case in the country was monitored in 1993, but previous to that, there were "rampant outbreaks of several hundred cases in a year," Roesel said.

Senators call for higher health budget

At the Senate, two senators called on the government yesterday to raise health spending with the detection of the new polio cases in March and July last year.

Senators Edgardo Angara and Teresa Aquino-Oreta said the drop in budgetary allocation for preventive health care and the percentage share of the health sector in general would work against efforts to combat the outbreak of diseases such as polio.

According to Angara, the 2000 budget for preventive health care was P3.5 billion while the 2002 appropriation was only P2.8 billion. Congress failed to pass a 2001 national budget and the old budget was merely carried over.

Angara said the budget for health services used to be 2.15 percent of the national budget. For 2002, the percentage share is only 1.86 percent.

For her part, Oreta said the detection of the three cases of the mutated polio virus shattered the Philippines’ reputation as the only polio-free country in the western Pacific region.

And because of the inadequate funding for basic health services, Oreta expressed doubts over the Philippines’ capability to fulfill its 1995 international commitment to allocate as much as 20 percent of public expenditures and official development assistance (ODA) for human resource development within 20 years.

Oreta cited data from the National Statistical Coordinating Board (NSCB) that showed public spending on health care alone remains inadequate, with annual expenditures growing at an average of only 14.8 percent from P35.9 billion in 1991 to P108.3 billion in 1999.

According to the NSCB, health expenditures represented only 2.9 percent of the gross national product in 1991 and 3.4 percent in 1999, still way below the five percent standard set by WHO for developing economies.

Oreta noted that the NSCB data also indicated that families remain burdened by the high costs of health care, with out-of-pocket spending representing 46.26 percent of total health expenditures from private sources in 1999.

Social insurance such as Medicare represented only 4.86 percent of the total health spending. The government accounted for 37.9 percent of total health expenditures in 1999, with private sources accounting for 57.23 percent during the same year. –Aurea Calica