OTHER than the controversy of the “unidentified doctors” in the current counterfeit drugs inquiry at the sangguniang panlalawigan, what should likewise concern, and more urgently so, our provincial authorities is that case of “undilutable” or non-dissolving vials of antibiotics in government pharmacies purchased out of provincial government funds.

The first time around, and again the Bureau of Food and Drugs figured in it too, it was at the Urdaneta Doctors Hospital where a government lady doctor found that some antibiotics could not be dissolved or diluted when these were about to be administered to a patient. The medicine came from the supplies delivered by a pharmaceutical company contracted by the provincial government thru its procurement unit.

Just recently, a similar discovery was reported by another government hospital in western Pangasinan on yet another drug that was among those delivered by a contractor-pharmaceutical company. We can only hope a more thorough investigation will be conducted as this could not but raise alarm bells about the quality of drugs the provincial government is getting from its contractors. One swallow may not a summer make but two could mean…avian flu is around the corner.

Levity aside, Provincial Administrator Boy Solis and the Urduja House supply officers may just need to take another look at the procurement safeguards for medicines in government hospitals or even check that these are being stocked or stored according to their sensitivity requirements. In that first episode of a “non-diluting” antibiotic in Urdaneta, BFAD investigators had all but absolved the contractor-pharmaceutical company of blame and ascribed the “phenomenon” instead to improper ventilation at the pharmacy counter of the hospital. BFAD had claimed that when it tested the remaining vials in a suitable environment, that is, aboard an airconditioned vehicle, as news reports put it, the product diluted. Ergo, the contractor-drug manufacturer and distributor are blameless.

As quick as it seems to be in putting government doctors under suspicion for dealing with counterfeit drug personalities, BFAD seems most often quite ready to believe the best in “other” pharmaceutical entities and give the later its seal of “good housekeeping.”

Do we see the provincial government that is, the Urduja House, nodding in agreement at the BFAD predisposition?

AFTER ALL
Behn Fer. Hortaleza, Jr.

WE can hardly blame Drs. Jackson Soriano and Jess Canto, top directors of the Pangasinan Provincial Hospital and the Region 1 Medical Center, respectively for bearing down hard on one of their own, Dr. Reynaldo Jacinto, standards and regulations division chief of the Bureau of Food and Drugs regional office, a bureau under the same Department of Health they all work in

Soriano and Canto were visibly dismayed by the absence of Jacinto during the committee hearing called by the sangguniang panlalawigan committee on health late last week to learn firsthand from the BFAD official just who are the “government doctors” he had linked in his media pronouncements as being in cahoots with suppliers of counterfeit drugs. It would have been their chance, along with the provincial board members now itching to put Jacinto on the burner too over the same pronouncements, to either confirm or dismiss outright Jacinto’s rather unfair allegations.

Whether it was arthritis or something else that kept the BFAD man away, the fact is with his absence, he had only managed to bolster the angry claims of “government doctors” represented by Soriano, Canto and the other chiefs of hospitals from the eastern, central and western part of the province that he was only really talking thru his hat.

Frankly though, we have the sneaking suspicion that even the hospital directors know, within themselves, there could be a grain – or whole grains – of truth in Jacinto’s controversial statements. If only the BFAD would be more forthright, they’d know better how to deal with their “erring” fellow docs and perhaps finally erase the cloud of doubt hanging above their heads after Jacinto’s verbal caper. No doubt Jacinto had seen that “list “captured from some arrested counterfeit drugs couriers earlier and holds the names in there right inside his head.

His would be an easier mental burden to bear if he would only – even in just an executive session with the provincial officials – bare the names in confidence to make things easy for everyone including himself. As an irked Board Member John Agerico Rosario blurted out when it was clear Jacinto wasn’t going to show up, the sangguniang panlalawigan committees won’t take the “BFAD snub” lying down.

Your move, Doc Rey!

* * * * *

We are challenging the gallant congressmen of Pangasinan to move as one in the face of the threat of a worldwide avian flu and put money where the health and welfare of their constituents are by funding the acquisition of vital equipment and buildup of emergency facilities in our local medical institutions. Foremost, and we believe it is still possible, should be the construction of negative pressure rooms in Pangasinan hospitals where those afflicted by the deadly disease can be possibly held to contain its spread.

We read in the papers many provinces already taking stock of their resources to handle the coming pandemic, not only thru the acquisition of anti-viral medicines and improvement of facilities but also the identification and designation of other areas where the sick can be taken when hospitals are overfilled in a worst-case scenario.

Everyone should take the cue from Health Secretary Pingcoy Duque himself who said it is not a matter of “if” but “when” the avian flu hits us in the Philippines.

Write your congressmen by mail or by –email, or by any means of contact available to ask them to part with a precious million each at their disposal for medical facility buildup now – instead of their usual road, bridges, computers, reading centers and basketball courts predilection for spending. What use are all these, pray tell, if people who should be enjoying or using these, are falling down like flies on a flystick paper?

We are not alarming people; we are simply forewarning them. Better to look like a fool now, than being tragically sorry later.

The Pen Speaks
Danny O. Sagun

TWO sensational killings in Pangasinan appear to have been solved this week with the identification and arrest of suspects. We commend our law enforcers for doing their job in the solution of the killing of lady Judge Paas from Natividad and Dr. Cerdan Lopez of Calasiao. The judge was murdered right in her home while the doctor was killed while maneuvering his Honda CRV out of a hotel in that town with his wife.

What’s amusing in these developments however is the penchant for grabbing credit by our enforcers, be they policemen or NBI personnel.

PNP Chief Art Lomibao personally came to town last Friday to present to media the suspects in the killing of the judge. The local PNP together with an organic body, the CIDG, claimed credit for the feat. Left in the cold was the NBI which surely worked hard too for the solution of the case. Good thing for the NBI it was able to solve the Lopez killing—bagging even a well-known operative of the Public Order and Safety Office (POSO) who acted as the “contact” for the hired killer, which itself was as sensational an issue as the solution of the case. Are some faces red?

It is a fact though that people trust the NBI more than the police in the handling of cases. Even trivial ones are brought to the attention of that agency. That’s a consolation for the hardworking agents at the local NBI office and their chief Joe Doloiras and his men Dave Alunan, Philip Pecache and Ges Gallang, whom we have worked with in our various information campaigns.

* * * * *
A holder of a PhilHealth ID should not assume he is free of the hassle once he is hospitalized. He can only get as much, literally only a discount of, say, 20 percent or even less of his hospital bill particularly if he chooses a private hospital.

Have you heard of so-called hold-up hospitals? We don’t need to elaborate.

Our experience show that government-run hospitals, for their ordinary wards, charge what PhilHealth gives as medicare benefits, say P400 for ward in a tertiary hospital. It may be true also with laboratory fees and professional (doctor’s) fees. What the patient/beneficiary will have to worry about is his medicines which are most of the time unavailable at the pharmacy so he will have to buy from outside drugstores. If he has no money, the hospital could not do anything. His Philhealth ID is practically nothing in that situation. We repeat. Your ID is not a guarantee of a hassle-free hospitalization.

Overall though, a Philhealth ID holder, pays much less for his admission and confinement in a government hospital than if he were confined in the private ones. Only that, in the former, you have to bear with congested rooms/ wards, indifferent personnel to include nurses and doctors, and other inconveniences. That is why some prefer private medical institutions.

It is very sad to note however that charges by private hospitals are almost beyond reach of ordinary mortals like us. An ordinary ward in a secondary private hospital costs P450 to P600 per day, and Philhealth could only shoulder P300. Special rooms with aircon cost P1,000 to P1,500 a day. Medicines from their pharmacy cost pretty much higher compared to outside drugstores.

And professional fees? Here lies the big difference. The attending physician charges P2,250 to P3,000 for a three-day-confinement aside from his daily visitation fee of P750 to P1,000 per day. No wonder you will have to shell out some P20,000 for just a minimum confinement of three days in a private hospital—and in the ward at that. Philhealth can only answer for some P4,000. So where to get the balance to settle your bills? Scrape for it in the bottom of your resources, that’s where.

There must be some regulations on the operation of our medical institutions, public and private. The main concern is to deliver service not only to earn profit.

WINDOWS
Gabriel L. Cardinoza

The city’s garbage and how to properly dispose it continues to be the center of discussion in the city hall these past few days. It took center stage after piles of garbage had remained uncollected in many areas in the city, catching the attention of no less than Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr. during one of his visits here.

From what we’ve heard, the discussions are still in the finger-pointing stage – who did what and that and who’s to blame for this and that. The city’s waste management division (WMD), which has absorbed much of the blows for the mess, had maintained that it was no longer its job to collect the garbage. It’s now the barangays’, said WMD chief Reggie Ubando, citing RA 9003, which is perhaps today’s most quoted law of the land.

But the barangays, in quick defense, are blaming their residents for not cooperating. Under the law, households should segregate their garbage, sell the recyclables to a material recovery facility and take the rest to a compost pit. Reggie’s WMD will just collect the so-called residuals, or materials which cannot be recycled or composted. That’s that.

By now, there is no doubt that almost every household in the barangays is already aware of its duty to segregate after more than two years now of massive information dissemination campaign conducted by city hall. But whether most of these households know how to segregate or not is another story.

Well, a team of highly-paid city hall waste management consultants have done a series of seminars on segregation in every nook and cranny of the city in the last two years. Whether its lectures have sunk into the people’s consciousness can only be gauged by the city’s present state of the garbage.

What’s also beginning to complicate the situation are the malicious rumors that Reggie’s WMD will soon be abolished and the city’s waste management will be outsourced to a private company. These wild talks have demoralized WMD personnel.

Added to all these are the conflicts in the barangays about the garbage fees – that these are exorbitant and that there are no proper accounting of the collections, in many instances.

We have nowhere else to go but segregate. And we have yet to see a barangay in the city strictly enforcing segregation at source. We have yet to see a barangay patiently teaching its residents how and what to segregate – not on a single seminar but on a daily basis. Each barangay has to have its own team of volunteers to do this. The Sangguniang Kabataan can be tapped for this project.

We have to remember that we are breaking a bad habit. Making segregation as a habit is the challenge. With patience and determination, we can achieve this and we won’t have to even talk about garbage anymore in the future.

ENDNOTES: Dagupan City Vice Mayor Alvin Fernandez has just been appointed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as member of the Consultative Commission to propose amendments to the 1987 Constitution. He is the only vice mayor in the 50-member commission, which is composed of academicians, newspaper columnists, former and incumbent national officials, mayors and governors and constitutionalists. Congratulations, vice mayor!

QUICKQUOTE: Become the change you want to see - those are words I live by. — Oprah Winfrey.