'H1N1's 2nd wave may affect 9 million Pinoys'

CLARK FREEPORT, Pampanga, Philippines – Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said here yesterday that a second wave of Influenza A(H1N1) in the Philippines could affect one-tenth of the population or about nine million Filipinos, but stressed there are no indications that the virus would worsen.

“So if our population is about 90 million, a second wave of A(H1N1) could affect as many as nine million Filipinos,” Duque told The STAR in an exclusive interview during a cluster meeting of mayors from Mindanao under the League of Municipalities of the Philippines (LMP).

But Duque said he recently got assurance from a World Health Organization (WHO) official that there were no indications that the A(H1N1) virus has mutated into a more virulent strain.

“So a second wave would probably be the same virus that is mild. So far, 98 percent of those affected in our country have already fully recovered,” he said, without citing statistics.

He said that a second wave would thus merely refer to a surge in the number of A(H1N1) cases, but not in another mutated form of the virus.

“It could be an epidemic, but there’s nothing to panic about,” he stressed.

The National Statistics Office (NSO) has estimated the country’s population at 88.57 million as of August 2007, and projected that by 2009, the population would swell to 92.23 million.

Duque noted that dengue fever and even ordinary flu were more fatal than A(H1N1) in the Philippines.

“The fatality for ordinary flu is about 0.8 percent, so for every 10,000 people affected, about 80 die,” he noted.

In its website, the WHO advised “countries in the northern hemisphere to prepare for a second wave of pandemic spread,” but added that “countries with tropical climates, where the pandemic virus arrived later than elsewhere, also need to prepare for an increasing number of cases.”

“Evidence from multiple outbreak sites demonstrates that the H1N1 pandemic virus has rapidly established itself and is now the dominant influenza strain in most parts of the world. The pandemic will persist in the coming months as the virus continues to move through susceptible populations,” WHO said.

Meanwhile, Cotabato Rep. Emmylou Talino Mendoza urged employers yesterday to pay special attention to pregnant workers who face greater risk of illness and severe complications once infected with the A(H1N1) virus.

She made the appeal in the wake of a warning from the WHO of a second wave of flu cases.

“Our worry here is we are already losing an unacceptably high number of women and young girls to pregnancy-related complications. And the menace posed by A(H1N1), if left unchecked via adequate prevention, monitoring and treatment, could aggravate the problem,” she said.

She said 14 out of every 100 deaths among Filipino women are due to pregnancy or childbirth complications, with 162 mothers dying out of every 10,000 births.

She noted the warnings made by WHO and the Center for Disease Control in the United States that “pregnant women are at higher risk of falling seriously ill or dying from the virus.”

The WHO warned that the second wave of infections would have profound health complications for pregnant women in the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Mongolia, and China, where there are up to 50 million pregnancies every year, and up to 50,000 of pregnant women die of complications.

There have been 218 A(H1N1) deaths in Southeast Asia: 119 in Thailand, 69 in Malaysia, 13 in Singapore, eight in the Philippines, five in Indonesia, two in Vietnam and one each in Brunei and Laos. – With Jess Diaz