House panel OKs bill creating center for disease control

THE Committee on Health of the House of Representatives has approved the bill that seeks to create the Philippine Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDPC).

The bill, a substitute for several measures, was passed on Monday subject to some amendments.

"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," Quezon Fourth District Rep. Angelina "Helen" Tan, the committee's chairman, said in a statement.

"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," she added.

Under the bill, the CDPC will be created as an attached agency to the Department of Health.

The CDPC will absorb the Epidemiology Bureau, the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, the STD AIDS Cooperative Central Laboratory, the International Health Surveillance Division of the Bureau of Quarantine, and the Disease Prevention and Control Bureau "except for divisions with existing laws" such as the Mental Health Division, Cancer Division and Oral Health Division, Tan said.