Dengue complaints

EDITORIAL

“It is normal for dengue cases to rise at this time of the year,” is a statement often used by health workers in government. This is when hundreds of thousands get sick of the dreaded disease and hundreds die because at this time of the year, almost every year, the Department of Health calls it “normal.”

From January 1 to August 6, reported dengue cases numbered to more than 45,000 with 34,652 in Luzon, 5,091 in Visayas, and 5,590 in Mindanao. The total number of affected individuals is 33.5% lower than last year.

Despite the decline, some cities and provinces in Luzon doubled the number of cases they had compared to last year. In Ilocos Region for instance, a 222% spike in dengue cases during the first eight months of the year was reported by the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.

A total of 4,665 dengue cases were recorded in the four provinces of La Union, Ilocos Sur, Pangasinan, and Ilocos Norte from January to August 2 this year, 222% higher than the 1,450 cases recorded during the same period last year.

In Metro Manila, cases doubled from last year’s 5,416 to 10,487 within the same period this year, according to the Parañaque-Wide Community Health Workers’ Association | AHON-Isla

. From July 23 to August 6, the National Capital Region recorded a whopping 1,258 increase. One-third of this is concentrated in Quezon City.

The decline from last year’s statistics should not be seen as an improvement on the government’s end, according to Nanay LuzvimindaSolayao, a community health worker of Isla PutingBato in Tondo, Manila and president of AHON-Isla, a people’s organization of urban poor settlers in Tondo. “One death is too many, one outbreak is too many. It is unacceptable to have this disease kill hundreds every year and yet our government does not do anything to significantly eradicate the problem,” said Solayao.

According to Solayao, one characteristic that places where dengue has been declared an outbreak is that these communities are poor and people’s economic and political capacities are low such as in Tondo and Parañaque.

Dengue Express Lanes cannot suffice to address the escalating problem either, she said. “Mosquitoes are not the only culprits for the deaths of dengue victims since majority of the patients come from impoverished families, they cannot afford to pay for procedures such as complete blood count with monitoring of the platelet count (decreasing count is alarming) nor can they afford to pay for needed laboratory procedures for blood transfusion.”

Community health workers are justified in saying the government should take decisive action in eliminating outbreaks and ensuring that patients are accorded free health services in public hospitals whther they are poor or not.