Health and wealth

It’s a question that had bugged and had been openly admitted by the Provincial Health Office (PHO), so it’s better to mention it again if only to cast a spotlight on and show the irony in the situation: why does Cebu, said to be among the richest provinces in the country, still have a large number of malnourished children?

More to the point, why does Samboan town, not a first-class town by any means, rank high in the most number of malnourished kids for at least two years now and its local officials have failed to do anything about it?

First, we focus on the claim that Cebu is a rich province, which Cebu Gov. Hilario Davide III sort of quickly debunked by clarifying that it has a lot of land with huge real estate potential.

There is still that Ciudad project being worked on between the province and a real estate firm owned by Presidential Assistant for the Visayas Michael Dino that could provide a huge windfall for the province but whose development had been stalled by the administration due to traffic concerns.

Then there are other development projects pursued by the previous Garcia administration like the controversial Balili project that will sooner or later be torpedoed by Governor Davide owing to irregularities in its purchase.

The Davide administration had no luck nor made any progress in selling, developing or forging a joint venture with a developer that would generate substantial income for the province owing to the fact that a lot of its properties are in Cebu City.

But income generation alone doesn’t guarantee a province largely free of malnourished kids. The PHO admitted that families in Samboan town are content with feeding their kids mostly with canned food and noodles, not the vegetables and fish that may or may not be readily available to them.

As in the case with children living in the metro areas, these ready-to-cook foods contain lots of salt and preservatives that not only fail to fill them up but are nutritionally deficient and downright dangerous for their health in the long term.

So material wealth in most of its permutations doesn’t necessarily ensure health as the PHO found in its survey on malnourished children in the province.

It also seems that some of their health workers in the province are questioning whether the numbers hold since tape measure and other faulty methods were used to assess their overall physical health.

If the provincial health officials can’t even agree on the actual health status of the children and the malnutrition rate in the countryside, how else can they be expected to handle other aspects of health care that require their immediate attention like dengue vaccination?

While the Davide administration pointed to upgrading hospitals as among its top priorities, we hope they are also focusing on preventive measures such as better nutrition for the children and their parents.