Binay wants higher budget for disease monitoring

Binay said she will ask the support of her colleagues at the Senate to augment RITM’s allocation for environmental surveillance to PHP248 million. (FIle Photo: Nancy Binay/Facebook)

MANILA — Senator Nancy Binay on Thursday pushed for an increase in the 2020 budget of the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) to address vaccine-related diseases such as polio and measles.

Binay said she will ask the support of her colleagues at the Senate to augment RITM’s allocation for environmental surveillance to PHP248 million.

She noted that the research arm’s budget for surveillance has been slashed from PHP198 million in 2019 to PHP118 million for 2020, describing the budget cut as “untimely and unsound” given that besides the polio outbreak, cases of diphtheria are now reported.

“Huwag nating hintayin na may dumating pang bagong epidemya, pero hindi natin ito malalaman kung tatanggalan natin ang RITM ng suporta para sa kaukulang surveillance (Let’s not wait for the next epidemic to come. We won’t know about this if we remove RITM’s funding support for such surveillance.),” she said.

“I believe that cutting their budget is both an untimely and unsound decision,” she added.

Binay argued that RITM’s budget should be raised as a whole to increase its pool of researchers and experts, and to provide the necessary training for its more than 1,000 personnel particularly specialists, and medical scientists.

“Community surveillance is essential lalo na sa mga high-risk areas na maaaring panggalingan ng mga nakakahawang sakit (Community surveillance is essential especially in high-risk areas for infectious diseases),” she said.

“Malaking tulong din ang mga barangay health workers kasi sila ang first link of the surveillance chain partikular sa mga depressed areas (Barangay health workers play a huge role as the first link of the surveillance chain, particularly in depressed areas),” she added.