DOH: Text from 22566345 not a scam but a survey

Department of Health INQUIRER FILES

MANILA, Philippines — Amid warnings for people to beware of phishing scams and spam messages being sent to their cellphones, the Department of Health (DOH) asked the public on Monday not to ignore a text message from the number 22566345 asking them to take part in a survey.

According to the DOH, it needs participants for its third Noncommunicable Disease Mobile Phone Survey, which will run until May 31.

“This survey is not a scam and can be accomplished for free,” it said in an advisory. “The number 22566345 is connected with the [DOH] and we assure the public that the survey had gone through the proper processes before its implementation.”

READ: Pandemic habits? DOH survey shows 40% of Filipinos drink alcohol, 15% smoke tobacco

Randomly selected

The DOH explained that the respondents to the text message were randomly drawn from its database, as it assured them that the”contact information [was] collected ethically from institutional records, maintaining adherence to data privacy protocols.”

The agency’s two previous Noncommunicable Disease Mobile Phone Surveys were conducted in 2018 and 2020. Each survey had 3,000 respondents aged 18 and above.

The questions in the survey, which are available in both English and Filipino, involve topics such as the respondent’s tobacco and alcohol consumption, diet, blood pressure, and comorbidities such as diabetes and demographics.

The results will be used by the DOH to formulate strategies and policies to address the growing number of Filipinos with noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), described by health authorities as a “silent epidemic.”

NCDs, which include heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung disease, kill at least 41 million people each year, accounting for 74 percent of all deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

In the Philippines, the top three causes of death last year were all NCDs: ischaemic heart diseases (107,767 cases, or 19.0 percent); neoplasms or cancer (60,906 cases, or 10.7 percent); and cerebrovascular diseases (57,288 cases or 10.1 percent), based on recently released data from the Philippine Statistics Authority.

Also known as “quiet killers,” NCDs disproportionately affect people in low- and middle-income countries, including the Philippines, where more than three-quarters of global NCD deaths (31.4 million) occur.

Tobacco use, physical inactivity, the harmful use of alcohol, unhealthy diets, and air pollution all increase the risk of dying from an NCD, the WHO warned.