UN representative baptized as princess of Bontoc’s Chico River
GMA Network
BONTOC, Mountain Province - Suneeta Mukherjee, the representative of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) in the Philippines, was baptized as “wagchas” or the “Princess of Chico River” by local government officials in an elaborate ceremony here.
Does that mean that Mukherjee, an Indian national and a strict vegetarian, would be able to partake of pork, the favorite food in Bontoc?
“No,” said Gov. Maximo Dalog. “But this is our way of saying that we are serious in our thrust for population management and development.”
Mountain Province and nearby Ifugao were among the few provinces in Northern Philippines that passed a code for comprehensive reproductive health.
Dalog said that the implementing rules and regulations of the code, as well as the Gender and Development Code were approved recently.
Mukherjee said local government units should not wait for the House and Senate to pass the National Reproductive Health Code.
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OUR TAKE: Hmmm. Princess of Chico River? What a title. Hindi kaya magalit ang mga bading sa Bontoc because that title should be bestowed to one of them not to some “interloper”. Hehe. Joke lang, UNFPA Representative.
Anyways, it’s good that Cordi local government units (LGU) view reproductive health as an important issue. Kudos goes to Ifugao for being the first province in the entire country to pass a reproductive health ordinance. Mt. Province followed and is the second province in the Cordilleras to do so.
Now, after passing their ordinances, the officials of Ifugao and Mt. Province should now buckle down to work to make their ordinance a reality. Let’s hope they won’t back down if the Catholic Bishops threaten them with excommunication, deny them communion, or anything like that.
Ito naman kasing mga obispo sa Pilipinas, biro mo ba namang they equate using condoms or other birth control methods with killing life daw. How very 19th century, ano?
This is a really sad story. Stolen from the Northern Philippine Times Blog:
BAGUIO CITY – The police and National Bureau of Investigation are now investigating Baguio General Hospital staff here after one of the latter allegedly forcibly pulled off the head of a baby from her body making it roll on the floor while the mother was delivering birth.
After three miscarriages, 22-year-old Amy Diaz and her 24-year-old husband, Bernabe, a gasoline attendant, were expecting their first-born to be christened Ayesa Bea Mae on Easter Sunday.
Their expectations didn’t materialize as on Black Saturday they had to bury her after the incident in the delivery room of the BGH and Medical Center Wednesday night.
“I saw my baby’s head roll on the floor,” Amy said, adding her husband rushed her to the hospital before midnight after she began to suffer labor pains.
“A certain Edward “forcibly pulled the head of my baby,” she claimed.
She said she saw the head drop to the floor and roll.
Amy said doctors had to operate on her to remove her baby’s headless body. She added it would have been easier to accept if her first-born was dead inside her womb prior to the delivery.
“We were told our child suffered from an abnormality,” she said.
Amy disputed this, saying an ultrasound and an ECG prior to the delivery showed her baby was healthy.
Following this, the couple reported the incident to the police and NBI. “We will have to wait for the results of the investigation,” Bernabe said.
Newsmen tired to get a comment from the hospital’s chief obstetrician-gynecologist, Teresita Agbanlog, but she didn’t want to release a statement on the incident pending results of the NBI probe.
Bernabe said he was told it may take a month to finish the investigation.
Mary Jo Dulawan, Ifugao provincial health officer, meanwhile denied that her son, Edward, a medical intern in the hospital, could have been the one tagged by Amy.
“He could not have been involved,” she said, adding Amy could have mistaken her
son doing the procedure.
She added her son, as an intern in the pediatrics department, is physically present in the delivery room but only takes over the newborn after obstetrician-gynecologists have done their job.
Other BGH personnel didn’t want talk on the matter to the media.
Another article at Nordis.
Particularly the dengue-carrying ones and especially in places identified by the Department of Health as high risk areas. From the Manila Bulletin:
34 dengue-risk areas identified in Cordillera
By Dexter A. See
BAGUIO CITY — The Cordillera office here of the Department of Health (DoH) has identified 34 dengue-risk areas in the region. It was feared a dengue outbreak now stalks in these areas.
Of the 34 dengue-stricken areas, 15 barangays are located in this mountain resort city, and the 19 other dengue-risk areas are in the different provinces in the region.
However, health authorities said that there is no cause for alarm because the agency and its partner agencies have put in place programs, projects, and strategies aimed at preventing the spread of dengue fever cases.
Dr. Myrna Cabotaje, DOH-CAR regional director, said that the people could prevent the outbreak of dengue-fever cases in their localities with the right information on the four ways of preventing it.
These are searching and destroying the breeding sites of dengue-carrying mosquitoes, self-protection measures, seeking consultation, and saying “no” to indiscriminate fogging.
Records show that the risk areas in the city are Engineer’s Hill, Aurora Hill, Santa Scholastica, Lucban, Holyghost, City Camp, Hillside, Irisan, Quezon Hill, Kias, San Luis village, Dominican, Mirador, Trancoville, and Asin.
Continue Reading…
If the Department of Agriculture (DA) is correct, we may soon be singing “Bye Bye Baby” to the native chicken. According to this report, “native chickens in the Cordillera, Philippines, are disappearing quickly. The region’s Department of Agriculture is concerned that the breed may soon become extinct.”
So who’s to blame for the native chicken going the way of their more famous cousin, the dodo? Blame the fact that not a lot of us are raising native chicken anymore and that we’ve become dependent on commercially raised poultry. Read the article here.
Speaking of commercial chicken, did you know that “cull chicken” is full of antibiotics and hormones and is thus bad for your health? Kind of scary considering that “cull” has effectively replaced the native breed as the Cordillera’s primary source of white meat. The Northern Dispatchreports that said antibiotics and hormones “may cause cancer and other ailments for the consumer.” Read it here.
Seems like we are killing ourselves softly by eating “cull”. Kasla pinikpikan.
