Government allots P1.021 billion for anti-TB fight

MANILA, Philippines - The government is spending P1.021 billion next year to fight tuberculosis (TB), the world’s deadliest curable contagious disease that kills 75 Filipinos every day, House Deputy Majority Leader and Pasig City Rep. Roman Romulo said.

Romulo said in a statement that the fresh funding, contained in the proposed 2011 national budget, would support the Department of Health’s TB Control Program, including the purchase of anti-TB drugs, laboratory expenses as well as prevention and early detection measures.

A substantial portion of the allocation would provide for the treatment of some 359,000 TB patients — 294,000 adults and 65,000 children — under the Directly Observed Therapy Short Course (DOTS), he said.

Under DOTS, TB patients get an uninterrupted supply of drugs. Either a family member or a health worker supervises the patient’s medicine intake, and treatment outcome is monitored.

“We have to quickly reduce the human suffering caused by TB, the sixth leading cause of illness and death in the country. The sooner we suppress the disease more aggressively with incremental funding, the better,” Romulo said.

He cited a warning by the World Health Organization (WHO) that if left unchecked, TB could become 200 times more costly to treat and nearly impossible to cure in the years ahead, amid outbreaks of multi-drug-resistant cases in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Philippines now ranks seventh worldwide in TB incidence, after India, China, South Africa, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, according to the WHO’s 2009 Report on Global TB Control.

President Aquino is set to report to the United Nations (UN) in New York this week the country’s advances toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include quelling TB, malaria, HIV/AIDS and other major diseases, Romulo said.

The MDGs are eight goals that 189 UN member-countries pledged to attain by 2015 “to reduce poverty and the worst forms of human deprivation.” The goals include specific target indicators.

According to the National Statistics Office’s MDG Watch, instead of decreasing, the country’s “prevalence associated with TB” actually increased to 273.1 per 100,000 in 2008 from 246 per 100,000 in 1990. The specific MDG target is zero prevalence associated with TB by 2015.

“Prevalence” refers to the number of new and previously occurring cases that exist at a given point in time.

On the brighter side, the country’s “death rate associated with TB” decreased from 39.1 per 100,000 in 1990 to 31.2 per 100,000 in 2005. The specific MDG target is zero death associated with TB by 2015.