LAST month Julie Hall, the country representative of the World Health Organization (WHO), urged the Philippines to send health workers to West Africa to help combat the Ebola-virus outbreak there. At the time, the disease had claimed some 3,000 lives. More than 4,000 have died since then, and the very grave threat Ebola poses has spread to at least four continents.
On October 10, during the National Summit on Ebola Virus Disease, Health Secretary Enrique T. Ona said the United States and the United Kingdom have specifically requested Manila to provide “human resources” to help in the global effort to curb the outbreak. Ona also said that, should the Philippines decide to send health professionals, it would be on a voluntary basis and undertaken with the assistance of the WHO.
Undoubtedly, the spread of Ebola demands a concerted and coordinated global response, as the outbreak has been described as the worst in the four-decade history of tracking diseases.
However, our country would best contribute to the global response and alert system by protecting its borders first, since the potential of our exposure to Ebola is probably higher than average, because of the ubiquity of Filipino health professionals and overseas workers in every corner of the world.
Our hands are already full in simply monitoring every entry in every airport in the archipelago. And with a significant overseas population and up to 8,000 documented Filipino workers in West Africa, we will need every qualified health personnel on deck at home.
Dr. Jaime Galvez-Tan, a former health secretary, believed that, if the country were to send health professionals, they should be sent in limited numbers and deployed mainly to study how the affected countries deal with the disease. He said our country ought to have a core of at least 100 well-trained, fully capacitated medical professionals on heightened alert and deployed throughout the country.
To date, 18 cases of suspected Ebola infections have been investigated. All of them reportedly tested negative by the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, which was designated as the national referral center for emerging and reemerging infectious diseases.
That is small cause for relaxing vigilance. And while we should extend whatever help we can, we should not jeopardize ourselves in the process.
E-mail: angara.ed@gmail.com.