RP hopes to avail of AH1N1 vaccine by October

DAVAO CITY, Philippines – Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said he hoped the country would avail of the vaccine for the influenza A(H1N1) by October, the probable dates that at least three European developers of the vaccine have posted their notice with the World Health Organization (WHO).

“We would be waiting for their information,” he said in a huddle with reporters after speaking in the Accelerated Hunger Mitigating Program held at the CAP Auditorium here yesterday (Thursday).

Duque said that the suppliers may come from either of the three European pharmaceutical companies Sanofi-aventis, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis. He said that the three companies were in different stages of their clinical testing and developing the vaccine.

“We would expect to avail of the vaccine by either October or November.”

The Bureau of Food and Drugs (BFAD) would still conduct its own clinical evaluation of the vaccine if it would be made available for the Philippines, he added. Bidding would follow for the DOH's P100 million purchase of the medicine. The amount is part of the department's regular annual budget.

The amount would be equivalent to 100,000 persons at two doses each, he said. “with enough reserve for any other infection of the A(H1N1)”.

He said that the Philippines has listed 3,800 cases as of July 22.

It would be the WHO would inform the DOH of any development “because we already them to place us in the priority list”.

The medicines would be administered twice on the patient, the firs shot to last for the next 12 months before taking a second dose.

The two doses would all cost P500.

The administration of the vaccine would prioritize the sectors “most at risk to contacting and compromising their health” and would focus on the country's health workers and the pregnant women.

“We would also accommodate those with existing conditions like those already suffering from pneumonia and tuberculosis,” he said.

He said that persons who believed they have contacted the A(H1N1) but were not clinically diagnosed because they preferred home care would not be accommodated.

Aside from the A(H1N1), the DOH has also included the monitoring of other influenza viruses as directed by the WHO. These include the H3N2, H5N1 and the influenza B virus.

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Medco eyes reviving Cotabato River Basin project, expanding coverage to Bukidnon

Project wants to curb flooding in North Cotabato, Maguindanao

DAVAO CITY -- The government’s socioeconomic planning unit for Mindanao planned to push through with crafting the master plan of a Mindanao River Basin project, which would involve reviving the unfunded Cotabato River Basin project and to expand it to include as far inland as Bukidnon in Central Mindanao, a move mainly to prevent recurrent flooding of the rice-producing Cotabato provinces.

The plan was to coordinate the work with the Central Mindanao offices of the National Economic Development Authority (Neda), Departments of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) and the Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).

The proposed master plan would focus on water resources development and watershed management based on detailed hydrology and basin simulation study, a statement from the Mindanao Economic Development Council (Medco) said.

Undersecretary Virgilio Leyretana, Medco chairman, said the master plan would include “interventions such as reclamation of river banks, dredging for navigability, eco-tourism
development and the putting up of infrastructure-support projects such as farm-to-market roads, food terminal markets, irrigation, hydropower, and flood control structures”.

The planned Mindanao river basin project would cover a total area of 20,398 square kilometers, its path traverses the northeastern part of Bukidnon, known as the Pulangi River, towards the Bukidnon Plateau and fed by 17 tributaries and emerges to the Cotabato plains and Cotabato River Basin.

The Mindanao river basin covers the marshlands of Liguasan, Libungan and Ebpanan and the provinces of Bukidnon, Maguindanao, North Cotabato and South Cotabato.

Leyretana said that proposed comprehensive development of the Mindanao river basin, known as the “Mindanao River of Peace” project, would help curb the perennial flood problems in Cotabato City and the provinces of Maguindanao and North Cotabato.

More than curbing flashfloods, however, Leyretana said he wasnted the project “to open up economic opportunities in the region, generate income and increase revenues for local government units”.

He said that the project would integrate approaches “to address the problem on flooding, watershed destruction and siltation of the Mindanao River Basin, the second largest river system in the country”.

“The development of the Mindanao River Basin should be comprehensive, integrative and sustainable, thus we have sent an endorsement to the President to include the Comprehensive Mindanao River Basin Development in her economic resiliency plan,” Leyretana said.

The project was also cited in the President’s State of the Nation Address as an important flood control infrastructures.

The Central Mindanao provinces of North Cotabato, South Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat and Maguindanao has been acknowledged the country’s rice bowl, while its own Liguasan Marsh, Asia’s largest wetlands at more than 54,000 hectares, and its rivers and lakes also teem with fresh water fishes.

But recent spate of flooding have been destroying large tracts of land, including in 2006 which two typhoons Cosme and Frank sent government to form a task force to look into the widespread inundation.

“In the light of the recent flooding incidents [this year], Leyretana called on the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) and other concern agencies to immediately look into the plight of the affected families and communities as well as the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to immediately act on the rehabilitation of the damaged infrastructures.

The recent floods have submerged 30 of the 37 villages here and damaged millions worth of properties and agricultural crops across Cotabato City and Maguindanao among other affected areas, the Medco said.

Leyretana said the Medco would request assistance of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), under the bank’s facility on Integrated Natural Resources and Environmental Management Sector Development Program. The DENR has a current watershed program funded also under this facility.

But he said the Medco may also explore other funding agencies.

The Cotabato River Basin project was supposed to be undertaken under a World Bank grant in 1999 fo the preparation of a River Basin and Watershed Management Framework Progam. The Cotabato River Basin was supposed to be a pilot component.

It was unable to take off and subsequent peace and order concern, especially in 2003 with a widespread armed conflict and series of bombings, forced the World Bank to rechannel the fund to the Bicol river basin project.

In 2006, Medco decided to revive the project during its technical working group meeting on flood control but the meeting agreed to develop the master plan, instead of only framework plan.

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Malaysian group to reopen sprawling hotel in Samal Island

DAVAO CITY – The Malaysian conglomerate has indicated to the Mindanao delegation to the East Asean growth area meeting in Brunei Darussalam early August that it would open back its sprawling hotel in the Island Garden City of Samal, sending fresh hopes at propelling tourism in the Davao region.

In a report from the August 5-7 Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines-East Asean Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA), Secretary Jesus Dureza, Presidential Adviser on Mindanao Affairs, said that the Malaysian owners of Samal Casino Resort in Samal has signed an agreement with them to open again its hotel project.

“The Ekran Berhad Sdn, a Malaysian conglomerate that owns a chain of big hotels in Malaysia, will re-open its Ekran Berhad Samal Casino Resort in the Island Garden City of Samal (IGaCoS),” he said in a message relayed to the Mindanao Economic Development Council, a copy of which was obtained by BusinessMIrror.

Dureza said that the discussion and signing of the agreement was made at the side of the 18th Senior Officials and Ministers’ Meeting and 14th Ministerial Meeting in Brunei last week.

The signing of the agreement was held on August 7, “as a side event of the BEBC [BIMP-EAGA Business Council]-LGU [local government units]-NGO [nongovernment organizations] Roundtable Discussion on Community-based Ecotourism (CBET) Development.

The Philippine-Mindanao delegation was composed of Dureza, Samal Mayor Aniano Antalan, Davao del Norte Rep. Antonio Lagdameo, chairman of the House committee on BIMP-EAGA Affairs and officials of the Department of Tourism. The Malaysian delegation was represented by Tan Sri Datuk Ting Pek Khiing, executive chairman of Ekran Berhad Sdn.

Dureza said that Ekran Berhad “also planned to work on mounting flights between Davao and Kota Kinabalu, in partnership with Malaysian Airlines (MAS) to coincide with the re-opening of the resort”. The airlines has closed its Davao flight in the late 1990’s due to the heavy and lingering effect of the Asian financial crisis in 1997.

“We're putting back on track the P1.5 billion Ekran Berhad investment in Samal,” said Dureza, who is also the Philippine signing minister in the BIMP-EAGA. “This is an indication of a sound business environment in Mindanao and across borders, there is now an opportunity to reconnect in the south.”

Lagdameo told a press briefing in Malacanang that the hotel was an old project “but it had to close” He said that Davao business and government leaders have been bridging talks with the Malaysian investors to reopen the hotel several years ago “and we're hoping that we can get
them back before the end of the year”.

“Concrete timetable will have to be done hopefully before EAGA leaders summit in October,” he said.

The DOT coordinator for Mindanao, Undersecretary Merly Cruz, also a senior Philippine official in the BIMP-EAGA, said that the Malaysian conglomerate’s plan to resume operations in Samal was based on sound business decision. “Sa tingin nila maganda na ang business environment sa Mindanao”.

The Ekran Berhad has opened only 245 rooms in 1998, from a planned 1,400-room resort before it closed in 2001 due to the Asian financial crisis. The resort and hotel sprawls on an area of 250 hectares and includes a planned golf course.

Before it closed, Michael Ting Se Ping, then the general manager of the resort and at the same time vice-president of the family-owned Ekran Berhad Services, operator of several hotels and resorts in Malaysia, said the company was poised to construct the P200 million golf course and wanted to infuse P700 million for the other expansion activities that included the opening of another 300 rooms.

The company later called off plans for a public offering and closed operation.

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DOST’s intervention in 2 South Cotabato lakes reaps job, ecological dividends

It’s science used to restore Nature’s health, providing abundant fish harvests

LAKE BULUAN and LAKE SEBU in South Cotabato could be science’s ideal application of its capability at restoring Nature’s health where humanity’s technological advances and commercial greed have threatened them.

Only up to early this year, water weeds – water hyacinth (Eichornia crassipes) and swamp cabbage or water lettuce (Ipomea aquatic) - have fed on human neglect and have nearly engulfed to extinction these inland water bodies that for centuries have sustained the food and irrigation needs of Lumad, or tribal, communities.

Whether timely, providential or incidental, but a mandated department thrust on livelihood provision and enhancement on the part of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) has arrested the path of demise of the two lakes, which have been closely watched and monitored by two universities.

The Sultan Kudarat Polytechnic State College (SKPSC) has already worked with local residents in the five municipalities around Lake Buluan and has asked the DOST to help them out. The Mindanao State University (MSU) in General Santos City has likewise designed its own action plan for Lake Sebu.

Both universities have included a set of technologies to be applied in the mainly lake cleanup program. The technology focused on extracting usable materials from the lake weeds, sparing experts from resorting to the option of merely dumping them elsewhere and pose additional problem to the already burdened adjacent lake environment.

Early this year, the DOST approved for implementation its economic stimulus package Comprehensive Livelihood and Emergency Employment Program (Cleep) with the two universities and host local governments to work wonder for Lake Buluan and Lake Sebu, which were also the traditional worship and offering sites of the Lumad communities.


CONTROLLING WEED POPULATION

In only a few weeks after the DOST, the SKPSC and the municipal government of Lutayan finalized the work plan of Lake Buluan sometime in April (DOST approved the implementation of the Cleep in Lake Buluan on February 2009), the weed population was conspicuously reduced with the employment of 60 harvesters of the water hyacinth and water lettuce, 60 environment brigade and 50 processors.

During a visit on July 30-31 of the DOST officials, Dr. Jesusa Orteza, dean of the College of Agriculture of the SKPSC said the harvesters manually extract or uproot the hyacinths and lettuces that have taken root in the piles of dead weeds underwater, and piling them up along the bank of the lake for processing.

Similarly, Lake Sebu also did the same also almost simultaneously with that in Lake Buluan, said Dr. Tersa Castillo, dean of the College of Fisheries of MSU-GenSan. She said that the program has hired 1,000 local residents for the lake cleanup, processing of the weeds into handicraft materials. Many of them were hired as Bantay Lawa members.

Both college deans were respectively designated project implementers in the two lakes.

The studies of the two universities have discovered the usable fiber in the water hyacinth, locally called “butete” in the Lutayan area, ascribing similarity of the bloated lower trunk of the hyacinth with the bloated stomach of a local poisonous fish variety called butete.

Orteza said that the fiber was the main material in making slippers, bags, baskets and other handicraft items, which were displayed for evaluation during the launching on Thursday last week (July 30) of the Cleep in Lutayan and in Lake Sebu on Friday.

The design of the slippers was made to provide therapeutic comfort to the feet.

The water lettuce, shaped like a lettuce but which grows to as big as more than one foot in diameter in its crown, was also found to be a good material for vermiculture, or raising and feeding the worm species African night crawlers. The worms feed on these lettuces and excrete the material ideal to feed the tilapia, or as compost in the farms.

The two universities have requested the DOST’s Philippine Council for Aquatic and Marine Research and Development (PCAMRD), for support, especially the member agencies Philippine Textile Research Institute and the Metals Industry Research and Development Center.

“It’s practically a zero waste program while providing employment and increasing productivity of the lake,” said Dr. Rafael D. Guerrero III, recognized as the “Father of Philippine Tilapia”.

He said that they would evaluate still evaluate the request for additional shredder, used to extract the fiber and the shreds, and twining machine, used to make the twines, the materials for the handicrafts.

Orteza said that only the stem of the hyacinth was usable. However, the leaves and the roots were also used for composting.


DIVIDENDS

Miriam Pangulima, 48, of Sitio Buri, a lakeside village in Barangay Lutayan, would be awaiting her first payment of P200, paid every 15 days, for processing the lake weeds, called by their generic name water lilies. Her earning would boost the meager family income earned by her husband, a fisherman and his 32-year-old son, who work as a shop helper.

Sanima Panga, 43, also a processor in Sitio Dungguan, named because her village is where the fishing boats would unload their catch, would now have another source of income than just selling native foods. She only earns as much as P100 as ambulant vendor, but often earned less.

Her little income could now tide her family over from hunger, after her husband was afflicted with pneumonia and remained untreated. Her village could be the most blighted community, with villagers living on small stilt houses just above the water level. The community mosque lay half submerged in water.

“We are very thankful of the project for making us fear the wrath of Nature but appreciating it also for giving us the bounty that have been denied to us because of the ‘butete’,” Panga said.

Orteza said that even without a program to enrich fish production, the dividends of the lake cleanup “even in the Lutayan part of lake, fish catch has already reach 25,000 tons per week, compared to the previous catch of 15,000 tons and dwindling”.

The lake cleanup has netted 3,450 kilograms in the Lutayan part since May but the lake has conspicuously reappeared with more water surfaces than only greeneries from the water lilies that appeared like real land mass inside the lake.

The Lutayan side comprised only ten percent, or 2,500 hectares, of the entire lake area of 25,000 hectares, the third largest lake in Mindanao. There were no lake cleanup program under Cleep in the other four lakeside municipalities, Orteza said. “But it is in this town where the wind direction commonly brings the lake weeds and other wastes from the other parts of the lake to concentrate.”

In Lake Sebu, the home of the famous tinalak fabric and the colourful T’boli tribe, images of the lake cleanup flashed in the video screen during the launching of Cleep, showed substantial reappearance of the lake’s water surface.

Gov. Daisy Avance-Fuentes, said that they have to dredge the lake bed of about six meters of dead lake weed materials to reappear and rejuvenate Lake Lahit (24 hectares), one of the three lakes comprising the Lake Sebu. The other lakes, Seloton (48 hectares) and Sebu (354 hectares), have been restored of its green water, from a near extinction of brownish-colored water.

She has already directed the reduction of fish cages to only ten percent of what was then before “to preserve the lake for the tribal and local population and to restore the health of the lake”.


Model program

DOST Secretary Estrella F. Alabastro said she would lift the experience of the Cleep program in Lake Buluan and Lake Sebu “as our model program of integrated application of technology, ecological conservation, enhancing productivity of natural resource and providing the widest employment opportunity to the disadvantaged local population”.

She said that the livelihood enhancement program in the two lakes have also generated consciousness of the environment.

“We have also other programs that complement all our little efforts at providing assistance to communities, like the one that we have in Aurora, where their coconut coir and twining activities have been used widely for soil erosion and flood control by the Department of Public Works and Highways,” she said.

Felix B. Tamolang, officer-in-charge of the Forest Products Research and Development Institute, also one of the five agencies comprising the PCAMRD, said that the Lake Sebu program has also its ramifications as an ecological conservation program.

“Looking at the contour of the surrounding areas, we would expect residents and government officials to be aware that the lake’s well-being also rely heavily on the conservation and protection of the surrounding forests, especially its watershed,” he said.

He said that water districts in the lowland communities should contribute in programs like watershed protection “because if the sources of water for drinking and for the lake would be destroyed by logging, everything would die also”.

The DOST has poured P5.13 million for the Lake Sebu program and P10.809 million for the Lake Buluan program, but Alabastro reminded the stakeholders in the two lake programs that “we are here only to provide the impetus and the initial funding”.

“The fate of the program would largely rely on your efforts to sustain the program, It’s the sense of ownership that often dictates the success of any program or endeavour,” she said.

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Filipino Muslims feel deeper sense of loss with Cory’s demise

Her religiosity, anti-corruption symbol endear Cory to neglected communities

DAVAO CITY – The religiosity of the late President Corazon C. Aquino has endeared her most to Filipino Muslims, who said that this has clothe her with the moral ascendancy to lick corruption in the bureaucracy that no other nation’s leaders have done.

“It’s very painful. The Filipino Muslims in Mindanao are in great loss and grieving over her death,” said Alim Mahmoud Mala Adilao, president of the Ulama League of the Philippines (ULP) in Southern Mindanao.

He told BusinessMirror that “all my neighbours here [in Barangay Mini-Forest and blighted Isla Verde] and I know that the rest of the Muslim community in Mindanao are discussing Cory’s death, about how she became the only President to stop corruption because of her religiosity”.

“Our sense of loss is due to her ability to stop corruption, a problem with the bureaucracy that has prevented it for decades to help us, the Muslims and the Lumads [indigenous peoples]. No leader can do it unless they are deeply religious as Cory,” he said.

“And she was the only President who died poor, unlike those who have enriched and enriching themselves while in office,” he said. “We salute her because she was the only President who did not abuse her position, allowing her to join us, the poor and the ordinary people.”

In an open letter he drafted on behalf of the ULP and which he hoped would reached the family of the former President, Adilao said that “it was her religiosity which enabled her to manage the country morally and well”.

“If only all our leaders are guided by this God-fearing religiousity, we believe that this county would not be led astray,” the letter would say. “We hope that her prayerful life should be the guide of all leaders.”

“To her family, our condolence. We feel the deepest sense of loss and pain, and our prayers go them,” said the draft letter.

“A very compassionate President,” said Davao del Norte Gov. Rodolfo del Rosario, who recalled that he also became a congress representative by the time Mrs. Aquino became President.

He said that this allowed him to observe up close the late President in Malacanang. “She’s very accommodating and has a ready ear to our concern in my district.”

“It’s a sad story. It saddened me by that news,” he told BusinessMirror. He said he would always remember her as a “conciliatory President, uniting the Filipinos”.

At the Araw ng Kapalong town on Saturday, he said he urged the leaders of government and private sector and the residents “to offer a minute of prayer to Cory”.

Belo Caharian, a key personality in the Yellow Friday movement and in the current women’s movement against government corruption and the Palace’s push to amend the Constitution, said “we are saddened that we might loss a symbol against mismanagement of the country”.

“The pain of that loss is even more deepened with the demise of a leader who practices what she preaches, that even while battling her ailment, she still hanged on, always the great woman that we know especially in crisis”.

“But then, we believe that even in her death, she would not cease to be a symbol of an upright leader, and therefore we should celebrate her life that she left as her legacy,” she said.

She said that all her friends exclaimed “Oh my God” in their replies to the text message she sent informing them of the former President’s death.

“We are all saddened and shocked, because we know her that even when she became Citizen Cory, she never stopped working for the Filipino people,” Caharian said.

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