Manila Once Again an "Open City" to Family Planning After 9-Year Ban Press release from reproductive rights group Likhaan After nine years of contraception ban in Manila, poor women and their families who feel its devastating impact can finally heave a sigh of relief. Full family planning services are just around the corner. On July 11, 2008, from 8:00 am to 2:00 pm at the Tondo Sports Complex, Manila, the Reproductive Health Advocacy Network (RHAN), in partnership with the Manila City Health Department, will hold a Family Planning (FP) Fair where clients can choose the FP method they want. This event coincides with this year’s World Population Day theme, “Family Planning is a Right: Let’s Make It Real.” “We see this event as a concrete step in lifting the misery in the City of Manila,” said Dr. Junice Melgar, executive director of Likhaan, chair of RHAN’s Legislative and Policy Committee and the lead organizer of the Fair. Dr. Melgar was alluding to Imposing Misery, a fact-finding report published by Likhaan, ReproCen and the New-York based Center for Reproductive Rights. The study documented cases of physical, emotional and financial suffering that Manila’s poor went through after family planning supplies and services were prohibited in all of the city’s health centers and hospitals. Dr. Melgar, a medical doctor, will don scrubs and join other volunteer doctors and health practitioners from Manila-based public hospitals and RHAN member organizations in providing all FP methods—pills, condoms, injectables, IUD, natural family planning, vasectomy and ligation referrals. All the commodities and services will be FREE. The Fair will also include an exhibit of informative materials and legal advice on violence against women (VAW). An estimated 600 clients will directly benefit from these services. Magdalena Bacalando, President of Pinag-isang Lakas ng Kababaihan at Kabataan (PiLaKK), a federation with 3,000 members among urban poor women and youth, said, “After this, we hope to see less women who will suffer the fate of Vilma.” Vilma is a 35-year old mother of ten from Vitas, Tondo, who had nine children during the time of Mayor Atienza and almost died in childbirth. She had to save 60 pesos to travel from Manila to Malabon where she had an IUD. RHAN hopes that the FP Fair will serve as an initial step in the return of contraceptives to the City of Manila. May this be an impetus for the city to grant its constituents’ right to plan for their families and to make family planning real especially for poor women and families. RHAN, a coalition of 40 NGOs and peoples’ organizations, is the country’s largest network working for reproductive health and rights. One of its main objectives is the passage of a national legislation on reproductive health.
Excerpt from "A Burnt Out Case," a 1961 novel by Graham Greene, one of the most scintillating literary minds of the 20th century, in my humble opinion. An interesting take on evolution and love.  (Conversation between Querry, the protagonist, and Doctor Colin) "I want to be on the side of change," the doctor said. "If I had been born an amoeba who could think, I would have dreamed of the day of the primates. I would have wanted anything I did to contribute to that day. Evolution, as far as we can tell, has lodged itself finally in the brains of man. The ant, the fish, even the ape has gone as far as it can go, but in our brain evolution is moving --- my God--- at what a speed! ..... "Is change so good?" "We can't avoid it.....Suppose love were to evolve as rapidly in our brains as technical skill has done. In isolated cases it may have done, in the saints...if the man really existed, in Christ." "You can really comfort yourself with all that?" Querry asked. "It sounds like the old song of progress." "The nineteenth century wasn't as far wrong as we like to believe. We have become cynical about progress because of the terrible things we have seen men do during the last forty years. All the same, through trial and error, the amoeba did become the ape. There were blind starts and wrong turnings even then, I suppose. Evolution today can produce Hitlers as well as St. John of the Cross. I have a small hope...that someone they call Christ was the fertile element, looking for a crack in the wall to plant its seed. I think of Christ as an amoeba who took the right turning. I want to be on the side of the progress which survives. I'm no friend of pterodactyl." "But if we are incapable of love?" "I'm not sure such a man exists. Love is planted in man now, even uselessly in some cases, like an appendix. Sometimes of course, people call it hate." "I haven't found any trace of it in myself." "Perhaps you are looking for something too big and too important. Or too active." "What you are saying seems to me every bit as superstitious as what the fathers believe." "Who cares? It's the superstition I live by."
Thanks to an acclaimed Filipino chemist, the country is now in the map (and lingo) of cutting-edge neuroscience.  Somewhere in the erudite pages of modern neuro-scientific literature, there are two peptides or small proteins that have the personality of our very own Juan Tamad. If the peptide IDs “conantukin” and “contulakin” seem suspiciously derived from two, not very flattering Tagalog adjectives, that’s because they are.
Credit goes to the impish humour of 2007 Harvard Foundation Research Scientist of the Year Dr. Baldomero “Toto” Olivera, the first Filipino to win that august distinction and who --- as the discoverer of these peptides --- obtained the right to name them as he sees apt. Their epithets (which refers to sleepiness and and sluggishness) belie these peptides’ powerful potentials. Conantukin or the sleepy peptide and contulakin, the sluggish peptide, are now undergoing phase 1 clinical trials as promising drugs for epilepsy and intractable pain in spinal cord injury patients. Snail connection The first syllables of the peptides’ names actually refer to their animal source, the cone snails --- beautiful but extremely venomous marine creatures in shells. Some shells can be so exquisite and rare, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, that they are said to be auctioned alongside paintings of old European masters, sometimes fetching a higher bid than the paintings themselves! These creatures have also been the subject of Olivera’s scientific fascination ever since he was an associate research professor making do with limited laboratory facilities at the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Medicine. What first caught his interest was the disproportionately lethal sting issuing from so small a creature like the four-inch conus geographus, which registers a fatality rate of 70 percent without medical intervention. “Our original work was simply to ask why the sting of the conus geographus was so lethal. We have no equipment to begin with, so one of the things I’d like to emphasize is you don’t need equipment to do science if you’re determined,” he said, in a recent lecture at the St. Luke’s Medical Center. With a little luck on their side --- in the form of abundant lab mice from simultaneous experiments in the UPCM lab --- he and a colleague devised the falling time assay to quantify the snail venom’s paralytic activity. They’ll have the mice clutch a wire screen upside down, inject them with different fractions of the venom, then measure the elapsed time between injection and the mice’s fall due to the venom’s paralyzing effect. After purifying the components of the venom, they were surprised to discover that small as the cone snails are, they pack the combined but different-acting venoms of the much bigger king cobra and the puffer fish, a culinary delicacy in Japan that fetches a high price in their restaurants due to the premium on the chef’s special skill of avoiding fatalities among diners. “When you get stung by a cone snail, it’s like being bitten by a snake and eating a lethal dose of puffer fish at the same time. It’s a beautiful example of convergent evolution in which snails and snakes (and puffer fishes) came up with the same solution for paralyzing their prey,” Olivera notes. The next important breakthrough came when one of Olivera’s students started looking into the molecular fractions of the venom that were thought not biologically active since they were not linked with any paralyzing effect. By injecting these fractions direct into the central nervous system of the mice, Olivera and his staff stepped into a veritable circus of behaviour symptomology induced by the different conus peptides. Aside from the conantukin and the contulakin, there are peptides that made the mice twist and jump, others that made them uncoordinated, drag their legs, kick their back and scratch, act depressed and so on. Cone snail venom proved far from being just the mere sum of a few paralytic toxins. It holds within an astoundingly diverse pharmacopeia of peptides. These conus peptides group themselves as so-called “cabals,” as they act very much like human secret societies out to unseat political authorities in overthrowing the existing physiology of their prey. So the peptide members of the “motor cabal”, for example, act to wipe out the prey’s neuro-muscular transmissions, while the “lightning strike cabal” do its damage through an uncontrolled electrical barrage into the central nervous system. (Conantukin and contulakin belong to the “nirvana cabal,” made up of conus peptides that induce a quiescent, happy state, opium den-style). The implications are even more mind-boggling, says Olivera, when one considers that the fractions they tested came from only one specie, among the 700-odd cone snail species found in the world. With no cone snail specie overlapping peptides with another specie, it is estimated that there around 50,000 peptides just waiting to be discovered and studied in the bodies of these creatures. Highly specialized hunters of the marine bottom, cone snails are also said to predate modern combination drug therapy by about 55 million years, having evolved an efficient “drug delivery system” for killing prey with their venom. In some species, this includes a dental system functioning as disposable hypodermic needles, and backup toxins for nailing the coffin on their struggling victims if the first-line toxins were somehow unable to finish the job. Home runs With many of their species living in Philippine seas, these cone snails are also one of Olivera’s enduring links to the home country despite his great success abroad. The road to his Harvard Foundation laurel was paved by a chemistry degree, summa cum laude, from UP and subsequent stints at the prestigious California Institute of Technology and Stanford University, where he did his doctoral and post-doctoral works. After giving UPCM a shot with his early cone shell research, he was lured back to the better-funded laboratories in the US, eventually establishing his research base and doing his most important work to date at the University of Utah, where he now holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Biology. A motor cabal peptide isolated in his lab, the descriptively named “shaker” peptide derived from the venom of the conus magus, is already shaking the tree of the commercial pain killer market segment dominated by morphine and other opiods for intractable pain. Approved by the US FDA in 2004, the peptide is commercially known as Priam (i.e. primary alternative to morphine). It works by blocking a particular kind of calcium channel found in the spinal cord synapse between pain fibers and neurons which carry the pain signal to the brain. Even with pain fibers firing continuously, the signal cannot make it through the synapse and be perceived as pain by the brain. Priam is marketed for patients with long-running severe pain which can no longer be alleviated by the cheaper but tolerance-building morphine. In addition to the conantukin and contulakin, other conus peptides that are showing commercial promise include a lightning cabal peptide that is now undergoing pre-clinical study for the alleviation of cardiac damage from myocardial infarction or during organ transplantation. In the more distant future, Olivera sees great potential for animal-sourced pharmacology, if only drug researchers will start looking at the living web of animal bio-diversity instead of studying animals in isolation. He notes that although 70 percent of approved drugs are from natural products, the vast majority are from microorganisms and almost none from animals. “The standard practice is to take a kilo of an animal, grind it up and (study it),” Olivera observes. “But if we have taken a kilo of cone snails, we would not have found the peptides. What chemists totally neglect is that animals are highly specialized, producing chemicals when and where they need them.” And with the Philippines having the makings of a bio-pharmacologist’s paradise with its rich bio-diversity, he has all the more reasons to stay connected where it all began. “Not only do we have a lot of cone snails, we also have other venomous snails, around 12,000 species. We are sitting on a huge pharmacological cornucopia that is still completely unexplored,” he adds. (Photo by Kerry Matz for National Geographics)
 With pro-lifer Lito Atienza out of Manila, reproductive rights advocates have piled up a seven-year grievance list in the new mayor’s doorstep.
32-year old Lourdes Osil, mother of seven and resident of San Andres, Manila, could have been one of the mothers feted by Manila ex-mayor Lito Atienza with monetary reward and other gifts for raising a large family in the years when an anti-contraception policy held sway over the city.
But a picture of female reproductive pride she was not as she recounted a six-act drama of her futile attempts to access family planning resources since 1997 when she had her second child and the city began putting the pinch on artificial family planning services and supplies.
Cut off from her free supply of contraceptive shots from the city, she had her third child in 1998 despite warnings by a doctor of the risk associated with her hypertension. By 2000, resorting to herbal remedies and the withdrawal method did nothing to keep a fourth child from coming. In 2002, she and her husband were still trying withdrawal when the fifth child came, bringing with it more health complications for Lourdes by way of a heart disease.
Two years after and then again last year, Lourdes and her husband continued to tempt fate with two more children. By this time, Lourdes has inquired about tubal ligation in a government hospital, only to be told that she has to shell out Php 3,500, a princely sum for her and her pedicab driver husband.
She eventually got access to an intra-uterine device from a non-governmental organization but doesn’t intend to let bygones be bygones. During the launch of a report by the reproductive right group Likhaan on the impact of Manila’s de facto contraception ban on the city’s women, she says she intends to file a case for personal injury incurred as a result of a local government policy that deprived her access to family planning services.
Most powerful advocate Presiding over a city of 1.5 million inhabitants with a population density said to be the highest among the world’s major cities, Atienza was perhaps the single most potent advocate against artificial birth control in the country. His actions didn’t seem geared to merely toe the line with the Catholic Church --- unlike many public figures who likewise found themselves unwilling to risk the Catholic vote --- but appear to be a matter of personal conviction.
In 2000, three years after he stepped up as mayor when the then-incumbent Alfredo Lim made a go for the Philippine presidency, the new chief executive’s well-known, pro-life leanings became official policy with the drafting of a local executive order (E.O. 003) that spelled out in broad strokes the city’s inimical stance to contraception.
Seven years hence, Lim is back in the saddle and reproductive rights advocates are pinning their hopes on the reversal of what has been decried as a seven-year plague visited on Manila’s childbearing women who are said to number more than half a million.
According to Dr. Rolinda Gante of the Manila health department, the policy reversal may be coming, but not in an instant. She requested that the returning mayor be allowed some time to warm his old seat first. “Mayor Lim’s position is that it’s the people’s choice. Kung gusto nilang mag family planning, go ahead. Sinisimulan nang ibalik.”
She also defended former Mayor Atienza’s intentions as basically good and noted that the city made up for its anti-contraceptive stance by taking good care of its pregnant women and offering medical attention free for everybody.
But she also said that the return to the pre-Atienza policy on birth control will make her job easier. “We found natural family planning (NFP) very difficult to inject to the people because dalawa ang kinakausap mo, unlike with the other kind of family planning. Nanay lang ang kailangang kausapin. And you have to visit the couples at least thrice in three months.”
NFP promotion or blanket prohibition? The Likhaan report pointed out that while there were a number of activities outlined to promote NFP in Manila, there are indications that implementation has not been very effective. Quoting anonymous sources from the Department of Health, the report said that lack of statistics on NFP adoption is a common brick wall encountered by department people liaising with city health centres in charge of implementing the program.
The limited statistics available may indicate why those monitoring would rather not say how the numbers stack up. Likhaan cites a 2004 city health department report saying that the most widely accepted form of NFP is the lactational amenorrhea method with 22,148 users. 1,401 people have also adopted the Billing method, another form of NFP. Combined, these figures represent only a fraction of the more than 470,000 women of reproductive age in Manila.
Likhaan and its allies here and abroad are now seeking out the women who have fallen in between what is pictured as pretty massive cracks in the Atienza-era NFP program. More to the point, they seek to round up a possible string of personal injury suits against Atienza among women like Lourdes Osil. The Likhaan report noted that about 70 percent of Filipinos rely on the public sector as a source of family planning services. The groups plan to brandish EO 003 as a legal smoking gun, although the closest that the document came to denouncing contraceptives is “discouraging the use of artificial methods of contraception like condoms, pills, intrauterine devices, surgical sterilization and other.”
Apart from citing as basis for litigation the acts Atienza did while mayor which resulted in personal injury to the women, they are still vague about how to go about penalizing the former mayor. Atty. Elizabeth Pangalangan, executive director of the Reproductive Health, Rights, and Ethics Center for Studies and Training, further admits that some legal avenues may not be available anymore because Atienza --- now holding a national government position as environment and natural resources secretary --- is no longer an incumbent.
They are exploring other possible legal arenas. “International laws are part of the law of the land. The charges may not necessarily be criminal. It could be for administrative or civil liabilities or violation of the constitution. We also expect Atienza to cite ‘good faith’ in his defense,” Pangalangan said.
But international legal adviser Atty. Aya Fujimura-Fanselow of the International Litigation and Advocacy Center for Reproductive Rights indicates that Lim’s reversal of Atienza’s policy can still stay efforts to bring the women’s grievances to court. “This is an example of ideology overriding women’s rights. As an international community, we are aware of the wrongdoings and are hopeful that the new Manila Mayor will revoke the policy and ensure that a comprehensive range of family planning services is provided to all women of Manila.”
Should the decision is made to proceed with a case, she said they plan to take the matter to local courts first before resorting to the international tribunals. “The Philippines is a signatory to certain international treaties and it is obligated to abide by these provisions, “adds Fanselow. These treaties include international covenants on civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights
She observes that while other countries also have policies that harm women, these policies are not as extreme as Manila’s “blanket prohibition” on contraceptives. The Likhaan report said that aside from the pullout of contraceptives from Manila health facilities, some health providers have also “refused to provide information, counselling or referrals for family planning, interpreting the vague wording of the policy as a sweeping ban.”
The report also alleged that the city government resorted to harassment and intimidation to enforce the ban. It cited the closure of at least two clinics who have been offering family planning services, the harassment of a sexual and reproductive health advocacy group conducting family planning education activities in Paco, Manila, the dismissal of a government doctor who has only been referring patients to NGOs for family planning services and a perceived pressure on big pharmacies not to carry contraceptive products, especially injectables.
Former Health Secretary Alfredo Romualdez says it remains to be seen how far Mayor Lim would be willing to accommodate conservative views from the Catholic Church about the issue. “The issue of politics and catholic extremist view will continue to cast a shadow over this but I think that reason will eventually prevail.
 Conversation with 2004 Nobel Prize winner Aaron Ciechanover, a scientist born and raised in a small country (Israel) and proud of it.
Grace: How was your experience as a scientist working in a small country, in terms of the infrastructure available? I'm asking this in the context of our situation(Philippines) where our brains have to go abroad to be able to do important work. Prof. Ciechanover: I can tell you my story -- why I decided to go back (from the US) -- but it won't help you because I was backed up by a system that was receptive to me. I wouldn't have gone back if my institute didn't have start-up funds for me, laboratory and infrastructure, exactly the same word you used. I got a package deal that made it attractive for me to go back. The love for my country was not sufficient. You cannot live on love,(laughter) especially love of country which is very vague. You need to have conditions to work...and it is the government who has to set up the infrastructure. We work closely with the government and we put money aside, raise funds to bring young people in. When people ask me about the future, I tell them my future is behind me already. We build a lot on the young,talented people to come back and we generate talent for our own needs. I notice that in the Philippines, that is not the case. I notice that numerically, you are probably the number one manpower exporting country in the world, and you are losing the best. You are not exporting farmers (not that farmers are not important), but doctors, high-tech people and nurses in which you invested a lot of money. Grace: You mentioned that Israel never had a single day without war or threat of annihilation? To what extent do you think this affected your country's drive to do well? Prof. Ciechanover: It's hard to say because we never had it any other way. But it had always been a tradition for Jews in Europe to study, before they even had a country, and they brought it with them when they established Israel. You may look at it like with the development of computers. It all came from the space industry, of which the big pusher was the US. And you know where the space industry came from? From the tension between East and West. The war industry pushed the civilian industry, and then all of a sudden, Russia exploded. Nothing was left of the ideology, and this shows you that ideology in general worked for nothing. You may argue that the need in Israel for maintaining the security (we have a very sophisticated defense industry) pushed a lot of education in engineering, electronics and computer science. I don't know if it would have been better or worse if we had peace instead. But if all your life you had to walk at the tips of your fingers (sic) rather than walking relaxed on the ground, it pushes you. Not that I would prefer war to peace. I would prefer peace to war. But learning from the American experience and our own, it's an incentive for our country. Still, if there was peace around and the Arabs had collaborated, I believe it still would have been better. Grace: In your personal case, it really didn't matter right? Prof. Ciechanover: I was lucky. I was not wounded or hurt and lived a smooth life. I never was a refugee thrown out of my home. No real disaster in my life. Grace: You mentioned that a new therapy for at least two types of cancer (multiple myeloma & non-Hodgkin's lymphoma) are now out in the market based on your discovery? (Ciechanover co-discovered why and through what system proteins are degraded in the body) What other innovations lie in store for the future? The future is very promising but it will be slow because we are understanding more of the system and identifying more enzymes that can be drug targets in the future. There are thousands of these enzymes that act like policemen and identify which proteins are somehow not functional or not needed and so needs to be degraded. We are just at the very beginning of drug targeting. And it will be for different diseases: known degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, additional cancers, inflammatory diseases, even infectious and viral diseases. ----------------------- Prof. Ciechanover was in the country recently to talk about why "Our Proteins Have To Die So We Can Live." Along with two other scientists, he won the 2004 Nobel Prize for Chemistry by going against the mainstream line of inquiry in cell biology, investigating the death of protein instead of the more commercially mined topic of how they are synthesized and transferred across generations.
 The accident itself was a minor misadventure within a bigger tragedy.
It was the black Nissan Patrol skirting the ravines on an ambulance run that prompted me to comment about a brewing problem: inadequate parking spaces in a mountain idyll that used to draw only a frontier-spirited few. Not two minutes later, it was made clear that this particular specie of the gas guzzler genus won't be making it to any parking space at all, in Sagada or elsewhere, for at least the next three months.  A beast among Philippine roads --- its many hairpin twists and turns snaking atop the breathtaking chasms of the southern Cordilleras --- the notorious Halsema Highway won't be tamed just yet --- certainly not by any presumptuous driver believing a vehicle priced over a million comes equipped with automatic override for recklessness and stupidity.
The brawny Cordillerans who drive along this highway on ragtag public buses have a point with those cowboy tunes they play during the long hours of travel. They've earned their spurs reining in this bucking bronco of a road --- not by riding roughshod over it but by observing a healthy respect for its rules. So ironclad are these rules and one breaks them only at the risk of one's neck (or a broken fender if one is very, very lucky) that there are probably more road courtesies practiced by these drivers on any given day than in the whole history of EDSA bus driving. Ironically, it is the same muck tainting things government from the ground up which seems to be preserving Halsema and the mountain enclaves it unlocks like Sagada from being overrun by the country club and theme park crowd, at least for the time being. The present Malacanang tenant, herself far from pristine pure, is said to be furious over the sub-standard quality of the highway portions that has so far been paved. The meantime clutter in the road portions under snail pace construction may actually have slowed down travel time from before, keeping the crass mob at bay. But for how long? Walk around Baguio nowadays and weep.
 A leisurely Sunday drive it was not to be for many entering Metro Manila the day before the 21st year after People Power Day.
Turning 21 is the normative turning point to maturity, unless one counts calendars backward. And that's exactly how the calendar flips for whoever give marching orders to the police and soldiers flagging down city-bound vehicles with a crowd large enough for possible mischief the next day. In their natty uniforms, what are these personnel but stylized versions of ragged bands manning feudal fortresses in the European Dark Ages. If you need any show of force at all to make a point, where does that put you and the institution you stand for in the rungs of civilized behavior? Not much above the law of the jungle. Whoever thought up that hoax about the "code of Kalantiao" as proof that Filipinos have ever lived under any objective rule of law at all must be on to a private historical joke indeed. People who try to shake the tree like Lozada et al just don't seem to get the point so patently obvious to people like Mang Domeng, the oldest mag-uuling in a charcoal yard in Tondo. Or maybe they pretend not to for their own agenda. Who determines the fate of the likes of Mang Domeng is not some obscure seat of power on the banks of the Pasig River --- the biggest fiefdom of it all. It is the minor government factotum and neighborhood pulis --- lords of the ulingan realm --- who extract their weekly share of the mag-uulings' earnings on pain of personal reprisal cloaked with legal authority. Only the amount of money changing hands seem to vary. But it is the same black grease of lord-among-vassals entitlement that oils the big and small cogs of venality from Malacanang to the ulingan. One's perspective can get so skewed by the sheer scale of it all that sometimes you wonder if making a blanket judgement of corruption is not somehow being anti-historical.
 Selected outputs from last year's story mill. Click the titles to read the full articles.
The Gentle Maverick Three interviews with those who chose to stay --- he who shook the tree of life, the Jonas who didn't run away, and a woman who lent her name to a gumamela. The Cancer Mystique There's one belief that still shackles many Filipinas -- confounding modern technology and good intentions -- and it's getting deadlier by the day. Twinning of Novelty and Tragedy A rare medical case got tangled up in controversy arising from its unfortunate sequelae. The Business of Science For their ideas to see the light of day, Filipino scientists are urged to learn to speak the language of business. Sleepless in the O.R. Are you ready to have your skull opened even while you're awake? Awake craniotomy is here. Pinoys at the Table When it comes to matters of the stomach, most Filipino adults can do more to eat healthy. Mother of All Perils The health outlook of mothers --- whether they've given birth to two or 12 --- and their offspring ultimately depends on the soundness of the society's health and economic support system. Hype Price For hypertensives, there is one other thing in life that's as inescapable as taxes and the tomb --- the daily cost of managing their condition. (A note on the photo: Over-developed tumor or under-evolved human? I shied away from eating citrus fruits for a while after doing a story about this bizaare medical occurrence at the Baguio General Hospital.)
 He looked leaner and hungrier then, though the hairline already hinted of things at ebb. The prosperous businessman's paunch wouldn't come until much later, more than ten years hence when he faced national television like one still not quite believing that all of it is not just a bad dream after all.
His name, so common, didn't register at first. A dupe of EDSA II, I've tuned out of Gloria gate long ago. Following its twists and turns is akin to to reading that greatest of newspaper spacefillers, the society page, Philippine politics being the biggest masquerade party in town where about 80 percent of Filipinos are just mirons looking in on the cavorting. The so-called whistleblowers who surface from time to time are the occasional gatecrashers whose integrity are therefore not unimpeachable.Jun might be the exception, although I must admit to a certain personal bias. It wasn't until a friend reminded me of Net Curricula, one of the meantime projects in my salad days, that Jun's face popped out from the haze that is my memory of people and places older than five years. What jogged my memory was the same goodhumored set about what is otherwise a nondescript, lab rat's face. Perhaps I associate the good humor with what is by far the most vivid, if not the only clear personal memory I have of Jun. He's the type who would notice what the girls crossing the path of his car is wearing and then pay an oblique compliment by rhapsodizing on the beauty of the Philippine scenery. I also have a aftertaste of a certain quixotic flavor in Net Curricula, which I think he undertook on an entrepreneurial dare after making his mark in the corporate IT world. It was not an unpleasant lingering in the tongue. I wouldn't know what the years have done to Jun or whether I am such a very rotten judge of character after all. But if I'm not that off the mark, Gloria might not be able to stall anymore until 2010 because finally, someone might have decided to break up the party for good instead of just gatecrashing to get some of the spoils. (Photo courtesy of GMA News)
 They mete out life to him, though barely, in little tubes that blow and feed and suck and cajole him back every which way to the world of the quick. It's all a boy can do to keep body and soul together. The flesh is too weary to keep up with a soul born to curiosity.
And so we find him, all of 10 years old and not a day wiser to the ways of the world than when he was two. Lying in a bed that is not just any bed, in a room that is not just any room. A delicate bloom cultivated in a green house, not to sit in a vase in some rich woman's parlor some day but just to slog it through another day. He usually does. He's a scrappy one they say. Physical pain doesn't touch him much. But how he feels. Must be that for every calcified someone who has somehow managed to trade his soul's birthright for tinsel, we find a Rico with a face as fleet with expressions as a sky prone to rainbows. He is holding his mother's hand while she cries out of sight. He wells up too, his mother's miniature. As he will doubtless do when someone else's unknown mother quietly weeps at the far end of the hall. Any emotional turbulence within his radius at all, this exquisitely sentient being will take it in. But with his mother perhaps, it goes back to the primeval link between baby's tears and mother's milk. Some will call it a piece of cute maladjustment in one that's otherwise impaired. I don't know. What it suspiciously looks like is something that so many souls have passed this way without much of.... an abundant gift of human empathy.
 There's something to be said about shooting first and asking questions later.
But be prepared to have the gears and pinions of your heart -- well-oiled or rusty and corroded these may be --- put out in plain sight. Photographs, esp. those that race ahead of our ability to understand them, hold up a mirror to what's inside minus the distort of our equivocations and procrastinations with words. Sometimes the autobiographical view can be as disconcerting as seeing one's intestines digest dinner. And the universe tends to add an extra punctuation or two just to underscore the message. Like what happened with the photo on the right, one of the few personal ones I took amongst a few dozen formal documentaries of churches during a recent trip to Pangasinan. I have to admit to a certain subversive urge when I saw the minuscule saint amongst a forest of dark twisted metals bathed by the less-than-angelic mood lighting. That its head was visually negated by a metal bar was less conscious heresy than technical shoddiness on my part. And --- with another guilty dig at my pagan forehead ---, I gotta confess it didn't at all hurt the effect I was after. The whole setup also stood out from the deep gloom of a church's underside even in late morning. When I chopped some of the forest, post-exposure, to focus on just couple of trees, my little heresy was thrown back at me twice amplified when I saw the true punctum/puncta of this image. Did I hear someone say that subliminal messaging is no longer the exclusive turf of liquor and automobile commercials? Or is my imagination just working overtime from days of looking for anthropomorphic images in the clouds?
 The dry pleasures of the book shelves and the red-blooded pursuit of photography have always been worlds apart in my solar system.
But sometimes they show themselves as reflecting the same light from a common sun. Or coupled in darkness within the same airless void. The difference between sun and void being one's cosmic weather at the moment. I caught a sunbeam recently when I encountered the words of an admired dead, white European again while browsing through a monograph of the legendary Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo. "At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is." - T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets (Burnt Norton). These lines have been with me for the longest time, not connecting with any gut experience, like the rest of Mr. Eliot's wonderful stew of the temporal and metaphysical so deceptively flavorless in its title. I've stored it up like a pretty but pointless trinket, more enthralled by the language and imagery rather than any worldview it might represent. Then someone attempted to explain Bravo's work and I saw how deep the hook of this poem, those lines, have truly snared my photographic vitals, the parts that come alive the most when the world renders up its overt and hidden codes in images. Conversely, I'm usually inclined to pay back Eliot and other secret sharers like him by impregnating each frame I record with the seed of a revelation. While words are never adequate, it's always nice to find the closest English to one's experience. When you click that shutter, how to describe that silent shout amidst the vastness of it all? Eliot's rhapsody about stillness and dance coming together isn't such a bad start.
 Not being gay nor a swinger, nor a recreational needle shooter or even a partner in pleasure and crime to those who are (at least none that I know of), mine is not the most compelling perspective on a modern-day plague --- recently trotted out again as conversation piece for World AIDS Day last December 1.
Experts now sing different covers of the same tune --- that the worst is over --- without knowing exactly why. With so many new mass pestilences ready to take HIV-AIDS's place (if they haven't already) as designated bogeyman, there's perhaps no time nor energy left to ask moot questions anyway. But I wonder --- how many armchair vanguards pushing this new think even went to dives like the dingy, third-rung movie theaters and "bathhouses" in Metro Manila and Baguio where intrepid local researchers behind this article I did in April 2007 sallied forth. Their purpose? To document a convoluted reality in the world's oldest game that may or may not be the new runaway variable in the AIDS equation. Because there are the avowed straights, the professed bent twigs and ... others in between. The chief researcher put it thus: "Why do we need to be worried about MSM (men having sex with men) in the Philippines? They are a high-risk segment that can also sleep with a low-risk group, the women. You can just imagine the high rate of STI they can then pass on to women. Kaya kawawa pa rin ang mga kababaihan dito." Now did I read somewhere that the way of a viral predator that has spent its force is to take down the careless and the weak of the herd?
 I was definitely watching out for mine when I did this one. Click this link for more:
Shopping For Beauty The upshot of it all is --- it's better to be thought of as using a regular hospital visit to the dermatologist as subterfuge for some other business on the same floor as the ob-gyne, than to risk being flayed alive by beauticians better qualified to pluck your brows than mess around with your epidermis.
 And you thought that "Desperate Housewives line was wicked enough.How many casual racial slurs pass under our noses just so?
This is a verbatim quote from a nice little paperback I'm reading authored by one of Hamlet's compatriots: "In Greenland, they say that Filipinos are a nation of lazy little pimps, who are only allowed on ships because they don't ask for more than a dollar an hour, but you have to keep on feeding them vast amounts of steamed rice if you don't want a knife in your back." The question is: How long can anyone really stand boycotting Danish cookies?
 
If 30 is the new 20, 40 the new 30, then the 80's is not just the era of shoulder pads and Duran Duran but the new 60...50 or even 40! Take it from these 11 exceptional Filipino seniors whose zest for life will put to shame our twenty-ish, thirty-ish existential angst. Literally did I greet the new with the old...spending the first two months of the year playing the favorite apo for the day to these goldies and getting first crack at the secret of secrets which wasn't no secret at all. Some guys just get sore lucky and die of cancer at 30 while others just go on and on and find their missing link to the common alley cat...nine lives and all that. Check out some of their choice quotes here: http://www.medobserver.com/mar2007/heard.html I hope (and I say this with a total lack of irony) that everyone of them lives to get my New Year's thank you card next year. Check out these links:
 Pretty obvious that my mind was somewhere else (or on someone else) when this issue was gestating. But the breast cancer coverage was an eye-opener. Somehow, I had this very primitive notion that's it's only a problem for the 36-inch, C-cups -- a club where I certainly don't qualify unless through an act of God or surgical science. Here are links to the January-March crop of stories.
- Breast cancer detection below par The main thing holding back the quantum leap in promoting secondary prevention for the top kind of malignancy among Filipino women is perhaps the same as with any other diseases in the developing world: grinding poverty and the concomitant ignorance and lack of access to health facilities.
- A business case for health The concept of the triple bottom line (profit, people, environment) in business is one catchy notion that sometimes tend to be a victim of its own success. One finds it adorning cocktail speeches of business executives who may or may not truly understand what it entails.
- Duque: Focus on safe delivery
 Check out the Medical Observer year-ender (Nov.-Dec. 2006).
The title of my main article here also connotes the sweat and toil, and the massive inferiority complex I had to labor under in writing a somewhat more technical piece than usual.
There were times I thought having an MD affixed to my surname would have made a difference. And so I kinda over-compensated --- ending up with a 6,000-word read that spans the bandwidth of experience between Greek mythology and speculative cardiology.
And of course, my piece on my favorite clinical psychologist and interview subject, Dr. Margie Holmes --- one infectiously exuberant human being --- also appears in this issue.
Check out these links:
- "Battling A Beast With Many Heads" Whether it's about risk factors or drug trials, CVD studies over the years have so far led up to the clinical wisdom that the disease can only be grappled with in multiples.
- "Doctors To the Classroom" ** A new advocacy asks of Filipino doctors and other health practitioners to revisit their calling.
- "Dr. Margie Goes Interactive" **She has probably done more than any single person to break down the Filipinos' reticence about sex over the past two decades...
- "Pregnancy and Domestic Violence" A dark view of childbearing that equates it with having one foot in the grave ....
- "Womb Stress Marks A Child For Life" We are actually shaping the life inside the womb, not really after birth.
- "Intrauterine Devices Back in Vogue" After falling briefly into disrepute ... after its advent in the 60's, intrauterine devices (IUDs) are back in vogue as one of the most effective contraceptive options for women.
- "Here Come 'Cosmeceuticals'" Cosmetics that cure is the irresistible premise behind yet another fast-growing spawn of the bio-technology revolution.
- "Richmonde's Medical Tourism Treat" If you have nine million Filipinos outside the country, you put a zero at the back of the number and you have a PhP 90 million (medical tourism) market.
**Not available online.
 Most writers have a fetish for bylines, don't they?
Though vanity certainly plays a role, I believe it's also about our contradictory impulses as creatures caught in between reality frequencies. There's our acute hunger for immortality on the one hand, and an equally pressing need to assert ownership over something as airy fairy as a bunch of words on pages or the computer screen. To pin, that is, the elusive worth of our toil to brick-and-mortar reality.
But what happens when you get credit for something you didn't write? That happened to me once before in another publication and it happens again in this issue though I'm not exactly complaining. I just hope no one starts consulting me for their dermatologic complaints.
Anyway, here are the articles that I did write.
- Joint Efforts Is there more to addressing osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis than palliatives for aching, swollen joints?
 My kibitzing into the affairs of people who actually still practices their love for the craft full-time (which is to say I don't, really... lately) continues in the saga of the Meralco Camera Club and my Leica-loving (or maybe -worshipping says it better) kababayan from Lipa City, Batangas: Mr. Chito Segismundo, the man who unintentionally got his Warholian 15 minutes in a largely forgotten (and forgettable) "miraculous" affair among the coconut fronds in that city during the '90s. Talk about virgin coconut.
Check out these articles in the latest issue, available in National Bookstores and Powerbooks:
Power Photography The heady days following EDSA People Power I in 1986 whipped up a different kind of frenzy among a dozen or so employees of the country’s top power utility company....
Photography's Miracle Worker Chito Segismundo knows miracles. He creates and demystifies them as a photographer-artist and teacher.
Also, some product tidbits about Fujitsu, Epson and HP.
www.cameraimaging.com
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