SENATOR Grace Poe on Monday urged the Health Department to use the social media to boost its information campaign on dengue, which is becoming a national menace.
She said the dengue cases had increased 16 percent to 78,800 in the first nine months of the year against 67,637 cases in the same period last year.
The Health Department says dengue has killed 233 people this year.
“This is alarming. We cannot just accept this as another statistic,” Poe said.
“We have to ask our health officials why it has come to this.”
Poe said that while all the means to effectively respond to a dengue outbreak were in place, public health facilities were now overwhelmed with the supply of blood running out and hospital beds lacking.
“It is obvious that we were not prepared for this surge in dengue cases,” Poe said.
“Knowledge remains our only weapon against dengue, so we should go all-out in our information campaign,” Poe said.
“More alerts should be put out on TV, radio, newspapers and social media to warn about dengue.”
Poe said the government should get more people involved in prevention measures and launch “information campaigns that will stick.”