A COALITION of health-related civil society organizations (CSOs) supported the petition to cancel a loan from the Austrian government used by the Department of Health (DOH) for the acquisition of 26 medical-waste incinerators.

The 1996 loan agreement worth P503.65 million involved the acquisition of 26 medical-waste incinerators from Austria for use of government-run hospitals in the Philippines.

In a statement, Health Care Without Harm-Southeast Asia (HCWH SEA) said the cancellation of the loan agreement should be canceled considering that the medical-waste incinerators were decommissioned after the results of an emission-test study jointly conducted by the DOH and the World Health Organization (WHO) were released in 2003.

In the study, the dioxin emission of one incinerator tested was 800 times the limit set by the Philippine Clean Air Act.

HCWH supported the petition of Representatives Edcel Lagman and Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel to the Austrian parliament to cancel the loan. Lagman and Baraquel branded the loan that financed the 1996 Austrian Medical Waste Incinerator Loan Project as obsolete and illegitimate.

“The petition should subsequently lead to allocating the roughly $2 million-per-year loan payments to the delivery of health services, where financial resources are sorely deficient,” said Ronnel Lim of the HCWH-SEA Program. “The incinerators were not as they were presented to be by the suppliers and we should not be blindly paying for them.”

In the petition, Lagman and Baraquel said the loan payment for 2008 accounted for 25 percent of the country’s total 2008 health budget for addressing backlog in infrastructure.

Lim said that in 2008, the total health budget was only 7.7 percent or P22.9 billion of the total amount allocated for debt interest payments which amounted to P295.75 billion. “This is clearly culpable for our poor health situation,” he said.

HCWH added that the funds used to pay for the loan may also be used for other projects such as the installation of nonburn-treatment technology, including autoclaves, for disinfection of medical waste from hospitals.

“By canceling the loan, the Austrian government could achieve the original purpose for which the loan, as an official development assistance, was originally intended, which was to help Philippine hospitals manage their infectious waste. As things stand now, the DOH hospitals don’t have the money to invest in treatment technologies because of this loan that needs to be paid until 2014,” the group said.

The petition set forth by Lagman and Baraquel is part of the Stop Toxic Debt Campaign of the Eco Waste Coalition, Freedom from Debt Coalition and HCWH-SEA. HCWH is a global coalition of 473 organizations in more than 50 countries working to protect health by reducing pollution in the health-care sector.

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