Group Commends Petition to Cancel Austrian Incinerator Loan
Health Care Without Harm-Southeast Asia (HCWH-SEA) commends the initiative of Representatives Edcel C. Lagman and Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel in launching a petition to the Austrian parliament to cancel a 1997 loan agreement with the Philippines used by the Department of Health (DoH) in the acquisition of 26 medical waste incinerators, which were later found out to be highly polluting.
"By canceling the loan, the Austrian government could achieve the original purpose for which the loan as an official development assistance was originally intended, which was to help Philippine hospitals manage their infectious waste."
HCWH-SEA
"The petition should subsequently lead to allocating the roughly US $ 2 million per year loan payments to the delivery of health services, where financial resources are sorely deficient" said Ronnel Lim of HCWH-SEA Program. "The incinerators were not as they were presented to be by the suppliers and we should not be blindly paying for them."
The 26 medical waste incinerators distributed to government hospitals controlled by the DoH were all decommissioned in 2003 following the results of an emission test study jointly conducted by the DoH and the World Health Organization.
According to the petition signed and launched by Representatives Lagman and Hontiveros, the Austrian loan payment for 2008 accounts to 25% of the country's total 2008 health budget for addressing backlog in infrastructure. The petition highlights that the loan continue to eat up a large sum of the government's resources which could have been allotted instead to the delivery of health services.
Mr. Lim added, "In 2008, total health budget is only 7.7% (P22.9 billion) of the total amount automatically allocated to the debt interest payments (P295.75 billion). This is clearly culpable for our poor health situation." He cited a global report placing Philippines 60th in the world health system, "awfully left behind by other Asian countries" — Singapore at 6th, Japan at 10th, Thailand at 47th, Malaysia at 49th and South Korea at 58th.
A recent report by Save the Children International revealed that only a third of Filipino children under the age of 5 get basic health care, making the Philippines one of the worst places for infants and mothers. Another report said that two to three poor Filipino patients share one hospital bed in many of the government hospitals, while seven out of 10 Filipinos especially in the rural areas die without seeing a doctor or a health worker.
Mr. Lim added that the money used to pay for the loan may also be used for other projects, among which is the installation of non-burn treatment technology, such as autoclaves, for disinfection of medical waste from hospitals. "By canceling the loan, the Austrian government could achieve the original purpose for which the loan as an official development assistance was originally intended, which was to help Philippine hospitals manage their infectious waste. As things stand now, the DoH hospitals don't have the money to invest in treatment technologies because of this loan that needs to be paid until 2014."