A committee in the House of Representatives on Monday approved a bill proposing the creation of the Philippine Centers for Disease Prevention and Control.
The House committee on health, chaired by Quezon Rep. Angelina Tan, passed the measure, noting the country is ill-prepared to address the challenges of pandemics such as the COVID-19.
Tan, one of the principal authors of the bill, expressed hope that the House leadership under Speaker Lord Allan Velasco will prioritize its passage.
“The bill seeks to modernize the country’s capabilities for public health emergency preparedness and strengthen the current bureaucracy that is mandated to address communicable diseases in the country through organizational and institutional reforms”, Tan said.
“To better prepare against public health emergencies, we need to embark on two essential initiatives: health modernization and institutional reforms. We cannot merely keep on rearranging the boxes within our health organization without capacitating our health personnel and resources. That will not work. We need to modernize and reorganize our health system at the same time to protect the public from health risks.”
The bill mandates the undertaking of necessary reforms in the recruitment, training, employment and management of the country’s public health emergency personnel; development of relevant programs for the acquisition and upgrading of appropriate technologies, laboratories, and equipment; and provision for the needed relocation, improvement, and construction of facilities to enhance the country’s preparedness and response to public health emergencies.
Once enacted, the CDC will be created as an attached agency to the Department of Health and serve as the principal agency mandated to develop and apply communicable disease prevention and control initiatives. It will serve as the technical authority on all matters regarding disease prevention and control.
It will remove the function of addressing the communicable disease concerns from the DOH and transfer this mandate to the CDPC, after absorbing the existing Epidemiology Bureau, Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, STD AIDS Cooperative Central Laboratory, International Health Surveillance Division of the Bureau of Quarantine, and Disease Prevention and Control Bureau except for divisions with existing laws like the Mental Health Division, Cancer Division and Oral Health Division.
Following the US CDC, which conducts critical research on both communicable and non-communicable diseases—from malaria and tuberculosis to diabetes and cancer, the CDPC will initially prioritize disease surveillance, prevention, and control of infectious diseases but may include non-communicable diseases upon positive recommendation by an independent study/body commissioned by the DOH at least five years after its creation.