THE chairman of the House committee on ways and means and Albay Rep. Joey Sarte Salceda on Saturday said he expects the immediate enactment into law of the proposed Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Act tasked to focus in the government’s fight against infectious diseases.

Salceda said the measure under House Bill (HB) 6096, which is a priority legislation in the 2020 State of the Nation Address (SONA) of President Rodrigo “Rody” Duterte, is now being thoroughly discussed in the Senate.

“Now that the Senate version is being discussed in their (Senate) committee on health, I expect that the law will move very quickly, especially considering the relationship of the Senate health chair, Sen. (Bong) Go, with President Duterte,” Salceda said.

The Department of Health (DOH) also recently reiterated its support for the bill recently, during a press conference.

Salceda was the first author of the base version of the bill, which he filed on January 2020, before the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic spread in the Philippines.

The Senate began its hearings on the CDC bill on May 6, 2021.

Focus on emergencies, infectious diseases crucial Salceda reminded the Senate and the House of Representatives, however, not to make the CDC too bureaucratic and to ensure that it is capable of responding to what he calls “sudden-onset” health emergencies, or emergencies that have the potential to break out and spread very quickly.

He also asked the committee to focus the CDC’s mandate on fighting infectious diseases.

In a manifestation to the panel, Salceda said his bill “insists on decisive response at the precommunicable stage, including the apprehension of precommunicable individuals if needed, because this is where outbreaks can be prevented.”

“The successful fight of Vietnam against COVID-19 centered on this particular strategy of hard and early isolation of the infected few over the diffuse and soft isolation of the suspected many. This author’s proposal and its copies refiled by colleagues is the only one among the different versions that insists on this distinction,” Salceda pointed out.

The lawmaker also asked the committee to ensure that the agency does not become “too large against its own good.”

“If the CDC is too large to include non-communicable diseases, we believe that it will be bogged down by the same bureaucratic issues that led us to creating this agency in the first place,” Salceda warned.

Salceda said that he hopes the House will move the measure through the plenary as soon as it resumes session on May 17.