Worms scourge of public school pupils, agency finds

NEARLY half—44 percent—of the 22 million public school students in the country have worms, the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said yesterday.

NIH Executive Director Dr. Vicente Belizario Jr. said the government’s deworming program was not as effective as it should be due to the lack of information and preparation on the ground.

“(In 2004-2006), 70 percent of Filipino schoolchildren had worms. The latest check we did—we were funded by the Department of Health to do a study at sentinel sites—showed this went down to a 44-percent infection rate,” Belizario said in an interview.

“This is still not acceptable because the World Health Organization (WHO) says it has to be under 20 percent,” he said.

Belizario said the national deworming program covered only 20 percent of affected schoolchildren, way below the 75-percent recommended by the WHO, even as the government buys millions of pesos worth of drugs annually to fight worms.

“It looks like it is not just the medicines but the infrastructure that has to be prepared to implement school-based deworming,” he added.

Belizario said the deworming program only covered students aged 1 to 14 who were given medicine twice a year. He sug- gested the program include students up to 18 years old.

He said a single worm passes “hundreds of thousands of eggs” that are infectious for up to two years.

In the private schools, Belizario said the infection rate was 10 to 20 percent.

The government, Belizario said, could make the deworming program more effective by addressing complaints like the bitterness of the medicines, the stomach pains and the expulsion of the worms through the mouths of the children.

“You need to tie up with local health units so that if there are side effects, you can take the children there, like when there have stomach pains or the worms come out of their mouths, which is normal. The public should not be frightened about that,” Belizario said.