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Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Cancer not Sars caused woman's death: DOH
MANILA -- Health officials Tuesday clarified that a woman who exhibited symptoms of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) who was admitted in a Manila hospital died of cancer and not of Sars as earlier feared.
The Department of Health (DOH) also took exception to an assessment by a Singapore-based consultancy firm that the country is "scarcely prepared" to deal with Sars in case of an outbreak.
An unidentified 54-year-old woman, a resident of the United States who had recently returned to the Philippines, was rushed to a Manila hospital Monday complaining of fever and coughs. By dawn Tuesday she was dead.
National Epidemiological Center chief Maria Consortia Quizon in an initial investigation said the patient had bilateral pneumonia (infection of both lungs), prompting health officials to categorize her as a possible Sars case.
A quarantine of medical staff whom she was in contact with has already been ordered.
Government doctors are tracing where the patient may have gone in Manila and the people she came in contact with, Quizon said.
Later Tuesday, Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit assured the public the woman had not died of Sars, after an autopsy showed she appeared to have a severe case of lung cancer.
"The autopsy showed she had a severe case of cancer of the lungs. There was a big cyst which apparently caused the infections, that's why she had fever," Dayrit said in a television interview.
"This is not a Sars case. She died of cancer."
Last week, President Gloria Arroyo reported the first "probable" Sars case in the Philippines after a 64-year-old foreigner was hospitalized in Manila. The patient later recovered and was discharged from hospital.
The disease, which is said to have originated from China and spread through patients who travelled by air, has so far claimed more than 150 lives and infected more than 3,450 worldwide.
Meanwhile, a DOH report said that the result of a survey conducted by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) merely reflects the respondents' "perception or subjective opinion" on the capability of our health system to respond to the Sars menace.
The PERC survey, conducted among 1,072 expatriate business executives in Asia, ranked the Philippines as seventh among the 12 Asian countries on their capability to deal with any outbreak of the disease, even below Hong Kong and Singapore, which are already hit severely by Sars.
President Arroyo earlier branded the PERC report as an "unfair putdown" as she emphasized that the government is doing its best to keep the Philippines Sars-free.
The DOH said the most compelling proof on the effectiveness of the country's preparedness is the fact that the Philippines remains Sars-free from March 18 up to the present, as corroborated by the objective findings of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The DOH cited several "objective criteria" that would belie PERC's claims, among them the pro-active stance taken by the administration in dealing with the Sars problem.
It said that even if the country is still Sars-free, the President has created the Sars crisis management committee, headed by Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit, to implement measures that would prevent the Sars threat from entering the country.
The President, the DOH said, has also made available a total of P1.5 billion to mitigate the impact of Sars in the country, with P0.5 billion to be released for the upgrading of the infrastructure, equipment and supplies of hospitals that will respond to Sars cases.
Other measures undertaken by the DOH as part of its SARS prevention program are:
* Beefing up hospital system capability, with the setting up of some 30 isolation rooms for Sars victims, to be increased to 300 nationwide if an outbreak occurs;
* Stricter quarantine measures for incoming airline passengers from SARS-affected countries;
* Keeping track of all suspect and probable cases of SARS in the country conducted by the National Epidemiology Center and other government and private hospitals; and
* Continued information campaign to make the public aware of the dangers of Sars and how to avoid contacting it. (Sunnex with AFP/OPS)
(April 16, 2003 issue)
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