Publication
Strengthening the Philippines institutional capacity to adapt to climate change: Health sector, Book IV

In the Philippines, improving maternal health has been identified as the most likely MDG not to be achieved by the target date as the decrease of maternal deaths has been decreasing too slowly to meet targets. Due to poor health, child health is also in jeopardy. Since climate change has been identified to exacerbate the effects of poor health, ineffective mitigation and adaptation are expected to make maternal and child health more fragile. Moreover, climate change is also expected to exacerbate vector borne diseases such as malaria, dengue and leptospirosis.

This is the last book of a four book final report. This manual is a supplement to the Philippine Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response System (PIDSR) Manual of Operations in order to provide guidance to health sector practitioners in making health decisions that take into account the influence of climate change and will serve as a quick reference on surveillance, a resource manual for training health personnel on climate change, and a guide for improving anticipation of health problems.

This manual is designed for disease surveillance coordinators and provides guidance to users on how the PIDSR can be expanded to increase the capacity in the health sector to make decision that take into account climate change. Specifically, the manual will describe the procedure for collecting climate parameters and their integration with disease surveillance data, the analysis of their relationships which can be used for the design of public health response systems appropriate under changing climate scenarios.