MindanaoToday.com | 38 deaths in Normin due to dengue fever
By: Uriel Quilinguing
CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY – The death toll caused by dengue fever in Northern Mindanao has gone up to 38, the Department of Health regional office 10 (DOH-10) reported on Tuesday, July 2.
Jasper Kent Ola, office-in-charge of DOH-10’s disease surveillance unit, said the 38 fatalities were among the 8,485 dengue cases they recorded since January 1 until June 22, this year.
Speaking in a Kapihan sa Bagong Pilipinas forum, Ola said roughly 86% or 7,232 persons who contracted the dengue virus from Aedes mosquito pricks got hospital care.
This year’s cumulative number is a 35-percent increase over that, for the same period, last year, he said, and that more than half of the region’s 8,485 dengue patients were within the five-to-nine-year-old age bracket.
Jose Chan, a medical doctor and chief the Northern Mindanao Medical Center, they had 196 adminissions for dengue patients in the first six months of this year and 10 of them had expired.
Chan, who also graced the forum at the DOH-10 conference hall, said this year’s 5-percent case-fatality rate (CFR) for dengue fever is similar to the 4.6 CFR percent when admission for the entire 2023 was 367 patients and that 17 of them died.
Meanwhile, Delio Aseron II, regional vice president of the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) Northern Mindanao, announced that the case rates of benefit packages for dengue patients have gone 30-percent since February this year.
He said patients of dengue fever, with or without warning, could avail of P13,000 from the previous P10,000, and for severe cases of P20,800 from the previous P16,000. These amounts of benefit packeges, he said, would be deducted from their final billings.
In the same forum, Wella Kindom-Brito, a medical doctor and head of DOH-10 infectious diseases cluster, said they remain focus in their environmental sanitation campaign as the most potent strategy in combatting the dengue fever menace, aside from distribution of vector control commodities.
She said that P90 million for the procurement of vector control commodities has already been downloaded fromthe Central Office to the Northern Mindanao regional office. The bidding process is ongoing, she said.
Kindom-Brito said the anti-dengue drive is still anchored on the 5S: Search and destroy breeding sites of mosquitoes; Self-protection; Seek early treatment; Support fogging if necessary; and Stay hydrated once diagnosed with dengue virus.
Ideally, she said, anti-dengue campaigns must be community-based with financial and logistical support from the local governments. They will provide vector control commodities such as insecticies and fogging machines.
Sulficio Henry Legaspi Jr., regional director of DOH-10, said their office will only augment what local governments have procured out of their own financial resources, including shares from the National Tax Allotment (NTA) as a result of Mandanas-Garcia ruling of the Supreme Court. (MT)
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