his undated photo made available by the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, shows the Ebola virus viewed through an electron microscope. AP
MANILA, Philippines—Health authorities are to meet Tuesday with the Department of Foreign Affairs to discuss the possibility of raising a public health alert in the face of the outbreak of the dreaded Ebola disease in West Africa, the biggest outbreak ever of the incurable disease.
According to Dr. Lyndon Lee Suy, spokesperson of the Department of Health, the meeting will tackle measures to step up the country’s efforts to make sure that the deadly virus, which has killed at least 932 people and infected 1,711 others in West Africa, does not reach the country.
“We have a meeting with the DFA to see what alert level on public health can be raised because so far the alert levels raised by the DFA were in connection with the war going on in some countries but nothing yet on public health,” said Suy.
Joining the meeting on Tuesday will be officials from the Department of Labor and Employment and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, he added.
The Philippines remains vulnerable to the deadly virus as Filipino workers in the three Ebola-hit countries Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia fly home to escape the contagion. Earlier, the DOH declared most of 15 Filipino workers who returned home last month from Sierra Leone free of the virus after close monitoring.
Two of them were still being monitored but health officials were optimistic that they would be cleared soon as they continued to show no symptoms of the Ebola virus.
On Friday, the World Health Organization declared the Ebola epidemic an international health emergency as US health authorities conceded that Ebola’s spread beyond West Africa was “inevitable.”
“We’ve already been preparing because we know we have quite a number of travelers from West Africa that might bring in the virus,” said Suy.
He added that the DOH was “doing everything” to ensure that Filipinos returning home from the Ebola-stricken countries were screened through the recruitment agencies, the POEA and the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration.
The state-run Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) also disclosed that it was already studying a package benefits for members who may be infected with the virus.
“We will probably be adopting the same kind of package that we had for SARS,” PhilHealth president Alex Padilla told reporters, referring to the highly contagious severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in Asia in 2003.
He said the package of benefits the PhilHealth offered to ordinary patients who got sick with SARS was P50,000. The amount was doubled for health workers.
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