The recent news of a Grade IV pupil dying after a mass deworming campaign has triggered fears once again about an effective public health measure intended to promote the health and proper development of children.

We must take mass media to task over its reporting of this incident. Headlines screaming “Pupil dies after deworming” will create another mass hysteria that will lead to parents refusing to have their children dewormed. In turn, this will lead to children being stunted due to their parasitic loads that prevent them from absorbing the proper nutrients that the parasites devour instead. We already have a massive problem with stunting and mental retardation due to poor nutrition to begin with. Adding the worm burden will worsen this problem leading to poor national productivity.

Mass media thrives on sensationalism to sell itself to the public, but it should not be done at the expense of the people and the country in general. Responsible reporting should take the stance that a sequence of events does not mean cause and effect, but may only be a temporal relationship. Certain events that follow each other may or may not be related, and we should leave it to the experts on the subject matter to explain any possible connection, if they’re connected at all.

The other problem is, the authorities who are supposed to investigate the matter do not approach it on a scientific basis. What emerged was that the pupil was hospitalized and died after a day due to sepsis, or a blood infection that can kill quickly.

Now, all the medical literature, or even just common sense, will tell you that a deworming medication cannot give a person sepsis, which is acquired after an initial infection somewhere in the body that spreads to the bloodstream. The doctors who treated the child should have been interviewed and asked how and why the child died. But there were no indications they did that.

Another measure that should be routine in unexplained deaths is the performance of an autopsy to determine the true cause of death. In this country where there is no law for mandatory autopsies for unexplained deaths, we bury the truth along with the body. When we say autopsy, it should be performed by properly trained pathologists, and not just any doctor who happens to be connected to law enforcement agencies.

At any rate, the family had requested the National Bureau of Investigation for an autopsy, which was supposedly done and results will be ready in about two weeks. Hopefully, the gross examination of the body and internal organs should be followed by a microscopic examination to determine the real cause of death, which only trained and board-certified pathologists should do.

Should there be any doubts about the results of the autopsy, it should be referred to a panel of pathologists for adjudication. It is reminiscent of the Dengvaxia controversy stirred up by a group of doctors who want to ride on the issue for personal purposes, even going as far as testifying in Senate to make pronouncements on vaccine matters they have no expertise on. Even as a panel of experts of the Philippine General Hospital declared that there was no connection between the Dengvaxia vaccine and the reported deaths, the Public Attorney’s Office still went ahead and filed charges against the manufacturer, DOH officials and even those who just did the bidding for the vaccine.

But the real answers came out in court where these so-called “experts” were deemed as not expert on the subject matter. The first set of cases were dismissed. But there are still many cases filed in court, leaving the public in the dark due to lack of complete resolution of the matter.

Should this happen in the current case, we may start seeing more parents coming forward saying their children died due to the deworming medication, which has a proven track record of safety and efficacy. Will the PAO start another crusade against deworming and cause more panic among parents? Will this result in complete loss of trust in our health authorities?

What is the government doing to prevent another mass hysteria? The last time it happened (Dengvaxia scare), confidence in vaccines plummeted from 92 percent to 33 percent. Measles outbreaks, which DOH refused to call epidemics, which had been controlled before, sickened tens of thousands of children and killed hundreds. As late as November 2025, there were 4,718 measles cases for that year.

Needless to say, dengue cases topped 124,000 from January to May 1995 while health authorities dither over approving the new dengue vaccine.

If we see more cases of malnutrition and deaths due to parasitism in the near future due to this current deworming case, who are we to blame?