DOH lauds Taguig’s success vs TB

TAGUIG City has won this year’s Manuel L. Quezon Award, a recognition given by the Department of Health, for making significant gains in the fight against tuberculosis.

The local government achieved a 90-percent TB case detection rate and treatment success rate, making it the most outstanding among highly urbanized cities in Luzon, City Hall said in a statement on Sunday.

Taguig has established a TB Task Force responsible for house-to-house info dissemination, identifying TB patients, and monitoring the patients’ completion of the needed medication. The city has 31 TB DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment Short Course) centers and a satellite treatment center at North Daang Hari for patients suffering from multidrug-resistant TB. The satellite treatment center also has a gene expert machine that can determine if a person is infected with multidrug-resistant TB.

The city-run Taguig City University also requires its students every semester to undergo medical examination which includes a chest X-ray. The city’s public school teachers are similarly required to take an annual medical examination and chest X-ray before the start of every school year.

In 2015, Taguig also won an award for Most Outstanding Local Government Unit in TB-HIV implementation without med-tech augmentation and Most Outstanding LGU in Community Based Organization.

Mayor Lani Cayetano credits these accomplishments to the city’s core of committed health professionals.

Based on the 2009 Philippine Health Statistics, tuberculosis ranked as the eighth leading cause of sickness in the country and the sixth leading cause of death.

The Philippines is among the 22 high-burdened countries in the world in terms of tuberculosis cases.

Around the world, 9.6 million people fell sick with tuberculosis and 1.5 million died from the disease in 2014, according to the World Health Organization. With Inquirer Research