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Sunday, June 30, 2019 Vol. 14 No. 263
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WANTED: MORE KIDNEY DONORS
KATTY2016 | DREAMSTIME.COM
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PHL health-care industry still grapples with renal-failure challenge By Roderick L. Abad | Contributor
E
VEN if modern medical care can now provide ways to treat the dreaded renal-failure malady, health-care experts agree that this remains a daunting challenge in the Philippines for lack of sources—human kidney donors—to replace malfunctioning kidneys of ailing patients.
While there are no current available data on the prevalence of kidney failure in the country, the number of Filipinos with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is on the rise, with diabetes and hypertension as two of the more common risk factors that could precipitate the disease. At present, there are about 3.5 million diabetics nationwide, and 25 percent of the adult population is afflicted with hypertension. Nevertheless, half of them don’t know they have either an excessive amount of sugar in their bloodstream, or high blood pressure.
These conditions, if left unchecked, could worsen, leading to an irreversible renal illness. Current statistics reveal that 35,000 people undergo hemodialysis on a regular basis, a temporary intervention for renal disease. A transplant is often the only hope for survival of ESRD patients to ideally live another 17 years or longer. However, only about 500 of them could avail themselves of such procedure annually. “The problem is a lot of people are on dialysis and they don’t know that what they really need is a transplant,” Dr. Susan P. Mercado,
special envoy of the President for global health initiatives, told the BusinessMirror after the media launch of the documentary film contest organized by Renal Gift Allowing Life for Others (Regalo) held recently at the National Kidney and Transplant Institute (NKTI) in Quezon City. “So if we were to really save the lives of people with renal disease, we need to do about 100 transplants a day.”
The furor
THE event was held amid the furor stirred by “ghost” dialysis treatment reports that may have prob-
ably cost the government billions of pesos, even as experts called on the Duterte administration to invest more in kidney transplantation to help address the issue of the alleged misspending of public funds for treatments of indigent patients. Reports alleged that even patients who had since died were being processed for claims with the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) by WellMed Dialysis and Laboratory Center. (See, “Government urged to invest more on kidney transplantation,” in the BusinessMirror, June 21, 2019). Continued on A2
Robots can now decode the cryptic language of central bankers
R
By Amanda Billner | Bloomberg News
In a matter of seconds, machines that mimic the human brain can read through dense and obscure policy statements and then offer a prediction. The humans who develop and use them say artificial intelligence gets it right, more often than not. Robots that learn as they go “not only analyze communications faster than humans, but also mitigate several human shortcomings,” said Evan Schnidman, the
founder of St. Louis-based Prattle Analytics Llc., which develops and sells computer-generated research on 15 central banks to hedge fund clients on Wall Street. “Human confirmation bias can lead to substantial analytical errors.” For central bankers who have long thrived on wielding the power of words, growing use of the technology means they’ll need to pay even closer attention to their language choices, especially if
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 51.3580
TAWATDCHAI MUELAE | DREAMSTIME.COM
OBOTS are on their way to cracking one of the world’s toughest codes: central banker speak.
computers seize on historical patterns humans tend to miss. Some central banks are already starting to vet communications through machines to gauge how they’ll be interpreted, although Prattle wouldn’t reveal which ones. Schnidman, who did a PhD at Harvard University on how central bank communications impact financial markets before starting Prattle in 2014, charges $60,000 a year for three to five users to access analysis. It takes about 45 seconds for the neural network of Prattle’s robots to read a 500-word statement and map the words over 80 billion connections to learn how the language is interconnected. It then draws on all prior language from that central bank to determine the
likely market impact. For Federal Reserve minutes, it’s even faster: clients start receiving analysis in less than a millisecond. This speed is one of the key reasons why advances in artificial intelligence are upending an area of research that, until a few years ago, might have seemed impossible to do without human common sense. That’s because the task requires not only swiftness, but creativity. Policy makers have historically been hard to understand, partly because of the complexity of the topic and sometimes deliberately. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 1987 he’d “learned to mumble with great incoherence.” Continued on A2
n JAPAN 0.4765 n UK 65.1117 n HK 6.5717 n CHINA 7.4672 n SINGAPORE 37.9614 n AUSTRALIA 35.9917 n EU 58.4043 n SAUDI ARABIA 13.6955
Source: BSP (June 28, 2019 )