Passengers walk past a thermal scanner at the medical quarantine area at the arrival section of Manila’s International Airport in Paranaque. AP FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines—President Benigno Aquino III wanted health officials to have contacted by now all passengers of an Etihad Airways plane that flew home from the United Arab Emirates a Filipino nurse who had tested positive for the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome-Corona Virus (MERS-CoV), a Department of Health official said Tuesday.
Dr. Lyndon Lee Suy, manager of the DOH’s Emerging Infectious Diseases program, said at a news conference that the President had strongly recommended that the agency’s contact tracing efforts for all the 415 passengers of Etihad Airways Flight No. EY0424 should have been completed a week after the OFW arrived in the country.
The male health worker arrived in Manila from the United Arab Emirates on April 15. He was initially diagnosed with MERS-CoV while he was still in the UAE, but the two tests conducted on him by the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) yielded negative results.
“The strong recommendation by the President is for us to be able to contact and locate all the passengers within today. We are working hard and all our efforts are focused on finding these passengers. We are optimistic we can meet the President’s deadline,” Lee Suy said.
“So far, we’re doing good. We don’t see any problem with (contact tracing). But of course, the faster, the better,” he added.
The DOH official declined to provide details on how many new passengers they have already contacted, how many have been tested, or even the results of the tests.
“It is up to Malacañang to release specific numbers,” he said.
But in a DOH advisory, it listed the names of 174 passengers who have yet to submit themselves to a simple and free nose-and-throat swab examination at the nearest DOH facility to rule out infection.
Lee Suy said the President did not want to be caught unaware that there is even one case of MERS-CoV in the country.
“We have to examine and test all the passengers before we can confirm if there is or there is no MERS-CoV case in the country,” he added.
The health official stressed that the urgency in locating the remaining passengers of flight EY0424 has no connection with the scheduled visit of US President Barack Obama to the Philippines next week.
“The visit of the US President has not come up in any of our meetings. It was never an issue,” Lee Suy said.
Lee Suy said Task Force MERS-CoV, which was mobilized to create heightened awareness and prevent the spread of the disease, is doing everything to contact the passengers.
He said the task force has the data for all the passengers and is using various means, including the setting up of a Facebook account (ey424).
Advertisements containing the names of all the passengers who had yet to be contacted by the authorities have also been placed in newspapers.
“Publishing is not condemning them. Nobody wanted to be on the same flight. It just so happens they were there. We just want to get them tested to assure that their families are also protected,” Lee Suy said.
He said the DOH, through the Philippine National Police, was prepared to carry out provisions of the Quarantine Law of 2004 in case of resistance by any of the passengers of Flight EY0424.
MERS-CoV is a communicable disease that may be passed on to others through close contact with a positive carrier. It has an incubation period of 10 to 14 days and symptoms may include fever, coughing, sneezing, and runny nose two weeks after exposure.
Meanwhile, overseas Filipino workers’ rights group Migrante Middle East urged the Philippine consulate in Jeddah to conduct medical missions to monitor the health condition of an estimated 200 stranded OFWs, some with children, who are more susceptible to MERS-CoV.
The OFWs have been staying since October of last year inside the deportation facility in Jeddah.
“We are urging President Aquino to issue a clear marching order to the Department of Foreign Affairs and DOH to urgently attend on the medical needs of the distressed and stranded OFWs in Saudi Arabia and other mid-east countries, form a medical team and deploy them in MERS-hit countries where there are large concentration of OFWs, distressed and stranded,” said John Leonard Monterona, the group’s coordinator.
He urged the Aquino administration to seriously attend to the repatriation of the distressed and stranded OFWs in Saudi Arabia.
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