DOH assesses health needs of crowded evacuations centers in Marikina, Quezon City

Volunteers assist more than 5,000 evacuees who are still housed at a covered court in Barangay Silangan, Quezon City. As of 9:15 a.m. Saturday, records show that at least 5,688 residents remain in said evacuation center. Thousands of other residents are said to have returned to their homes as the weather improves. (PNA photo by Oliver Marquez)

MANILA — The Department of Health (DOH) said Saturday that it will conduct some visitations to highly-populated evacuation centers in Marikina and Quezon City that houses people affected by tropical storm “Mario”.

According to DOH Undersecretary Teodoro Herbosa, he, together with the National Capital Region (NCR) Health Emergency Management team will be visiting some big evacuation centers in the two cities to assess the health situations of the affected families.

“We will conduct the visit to assess at the same time what are the other health concerns of the people there especially the children staying there. We will also asses if there is a need to provide more medicine and other health related needs,” Herbosa said in an interview with the Philippines News Agency.

Herbosa added that while he is confident that there are enough medicine and health assistance that were prepared and served by the concerned local government units affected by “Mario,” they will also heed the call of the people who will be asking for additional medicines as needed especially if there were large numbers of evacuees.

“We also want to see how are the conditions of the children and the families in the said evacuation centers especially the crowded ones where the possibility of spreading infections and other illnesses is possible to those with low immune system due to close contact with each other and look for ways on how we can improve our service to them,” he further added.

He also emphasized that they will be distributing aqua tabs to the health centers so that evacuees will have safe drinking water to prevent drinking contaminated water that may result to typhoid fever.

“Since we (DOH) understands that it is highly difficult task to keep on boiling water in evacuation centers every time there is a need for them to drink safe water due to their large number, we come up with this distribution of aqua tabs,” he further added.

Aqua tabs is a tablet which is added to drinking water to kill most harmful micro-organisms.

The tablet dissolves clearly within minutes and disinfects the water within 30 minutes.