DIGOS CITY, Davao City, June 27 (PIA) – Fighting and preventing kidney disease has been a continuous battle cry of advocates from the government sector and medical practitioners.
Kidney specialist consultant Dr. Franklin Guillano of Davao City raised the need to keep on with the advocacy for the public to fully understand about renal health care, and consequently avoid the debilitating disease.
“The public must know that kidney disease is very common, but very deadly,” Guillano conveyed to the media practitioners of Davao del Sur on Wednesday’s (June 26) special edition of the Kapihan sa PIA-XI at Arnaldo’s Hotel and Restaurant in Digos City.
He said that though there are treatments for the disease such as dialysis and kidney transplantation, it is still best for people to prevent damaging their kidneys.
For normal persons to evade the illness, Guillano strongly recommended a healthy lifestyle, proper food intake, adequate intake of water, and regularly undergoing annual urinalysis which could detect early symptoms of the disease.
For those with the disease, he said prevention efforts must still be undertaken to avoid progression of the illness such as averting stage 1 from leveling up to stage 2, and more efforts to stop it from developing to stage 5 or the End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD).
ESRD is chronic or the severity of the acute kidney disease, that requires kidney transplantation as the best treatment to prolong the patients’ life, explained Guillano who is also a kidney transplant specialist of the Southern Philippines Medical Center, Davao Regional Hospital and Davao Doctors Hospital.
He also raised the importance of controlling the three major causes of kidney disorder such as secondary diabetes, hypertension and chronic glomerulonephritis, saying that the growing problem of these diseases would result to the rising number of kidney disorder cases.
The crusade against kidney disorder has been intensified following a notable growing number of new patients undergoing dialysis a year based on the data from the Philippine Renal Disease Registry (PRDR) which is being administered by the National Kidney and Transplant Institute-Renal Disease Control Program (NKTI-REDCOP).
Guillano cited a PRDR report showing that there were 10,491 new patients undergoing dialysis nationwide in 2011, 506 of which were patients from Davao Region.
He said around 1,000 patients in Region XI are undergoing maintenance dialysis mostly from Davao City.
He mentioned another indication that cases are increasing based on PhilHealth’s account that number of dialysis patients has currently ranked one in the most served by the health insurance corporation, overtaken by the number of birth deliveries.
Last year, it was reported that Davao Region ranked number four in the number of kidney patients nationwide, followed by Bicol Region, Region 4 and the National Capital Region on the top spot.
With the present state of the renal health in the country, Guillano urged the Davao del Sur media to be partners in the advocacy effort to fight kidney disease, conveying his self-composed slogan “Let’s stage a world war K.”
His call was in time for the celebration of the 2013 Kidney Month this June, bearing the theme “Malusog na Bato, Yan ang Gusto Ko!”
The campaign against kidney ailment in the country has been spearheaded by NKTI-REDCOP in partnership with the Philippine Society of Nephrologists and Philippine Information Agency. (PIA-XI/Carina L. Cayon)
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