Former Official of WHO slams Pnoy’s ‘speculative mathematical twist’

A former official of the internationally recognised health institution, the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Susan Mercado criticized the controversial Dengvaxia vaccine issue that put former president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III under fire.

In a Facebook post, Mercado said that she was frightened by the figures the former president released in relation to the number of dengue cases in the Philippines, particularly in regions 3, 5 and 8.

Mercado noted how the said statement of the president was inconsistent to his goal of  ‘calming people down’ since the alleged numbers were blown up to an exaggerated statistic which Mercado believes would just cause unnecessary public panic.

Dr. Susan Mercado / Photo credits to the owner

Read her full post here:

I find it very disturbing that President Aquino opened his statement yesterday with data that borders on the absurd.

He said that there was an increase in dengue cases by 100% in Region 3 and 5 and 1,409.5% in Region 8. “What is frightening here is, if there are an estimates 200,000 cases of dengue each year, and it is possible for them to increase 14 times like what happened in Region 8, the number of those who may potentially be infected is 2.8 million”.

Photo credits to the owner

Photo credits to the owner

A quick search will show that the entire Western Pacific Region (including China, Fiji, Vietnam and other countries with dengue problems) ith a total population of 1.9 billion people only reported 500,000 cases in 2016. (WHO Western Pacific Region Dengue Fact Sheet)

Students of public health will quickly point out that you cannot take an increases incidence rate of dengue in a LOCALITY and multiply it by the NATIONAL number of cases.

Photo credits to the owner

Photo credits to the owner

There may have been a number of reasons for the hyperactivity of the mosquitoes in Region 8, but mosquitoes can only live for 2-3 days, and they can only fly for 400 meters. So an outbreak is usually localized.

It is inconsistent for President Aquino to say that the governments role is “to calm people down” while he did just the opposite. Using a speculative mathematical twist he has scared the public into thinking that we could have as many as 2.8 million cases of dengue.

Photo credits to the owner

Photo credits to the owner

is this faulty statistic the justification for buying 3.0 billion worth of vaccines that had never been tested in a population - at phenomenal speed?

No, we cannot possibly be in a ny imaginable situation where we would have 2.8 million cases of dengue. No country in this region has ever had numbers close to this. Viet Nam, has always had the largest number of cases, and at its peak it was close to a million cases.

With due respect, that opening statement was alarmist, cannot be backed up by epidemiological modeling and is yet another insult to the intelligence of the public health community in this country.

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Source: Dr. Susan Mercado