Scientists trace Cebu kids in generation-long project

CEBU CITY – Despite limp local government support, scientists here monitored the birth, growth, as well as achievements and failures of 3,080 kids in a now two-decade project. In the process, the project reshaped even foreign aid policies and research programs.

From 1983 to this day, the "Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey" (CLHNS) followed the children – born between May 1, 1983 and April 30, 1984 – in 33 Metro Cebu barangays (17 urban, 16 rural). Their 3,237 mothers were pinpointed from 28,000 households.

"Inter-generational studies are extremely rare," biological anthropologist Linda Adair and economist Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina point out in the Culture & Society quarterly. But they have immense policy spin-offs.

"The first World Bank health financing strategy was based in large part on research conducted in Cebu City," Adair and Popkin note.

Cebu research was "instrumental in Unicef policy related to breast-milk substitutes and Asian Development Bank programs on early childhood development."

This study-over-a-generation project, at last count, spun off 93 major studies, Ph.D. dissertations and reports. They have been published all over: from Oxford University to the Journal of Development Economics and the World Bank Economic Review.

Range of data

Studies anchored on the meticulously gathered Cebu data ranged widely. Papers covered infant mortality, growth and health to fetal origins of adult disease. Economic and social impact on urbanization, women’s health, work, nutrition and husband’s roles, is examined.

Culture & Society’s special issue pays tribute to Fr. Wilhelm Flieger, SVD, the low-key San Carlos University demographer who directed the CLHNS. Flieger died in 1999.

"Of all who sat in my class, ("Bill" Flieger) was the student, and later the associate, of whom I was proudest," Harvard University professor emeritus Nathan Keyfitz writes. "It is good to hear that the professional work he initiated at the Office of Population Studies (OPS), is to be carried forward…"

In 1979, the then 48-year-old Society of Divine Word silver-haired priest established OPS at the Talamban campus of USC. He was by then an acknowledged world expert in mortality research. His reputation as Keyfitz’s co-author of World Population preceded him.

Flieger trained in OPS a generation of Filipino demographers. They include Alice Lim, Leonel Deang, M. Abenoja, Josefina Avila and Soccoro Gultiano, now the OPS director.

OPS also published landmarks studies. Among them are Cebu, a socio-economic profile based on census data, and The Mountains of Cebu and Their Inhabitants.

Flieger and his co-author probed, in Mountains of Cebu, the paradox of people clinging to ecologically ravaged uplands over long periods of time, New Zealand University of Walkato’s Peter Urich notes.

They demonstrated that "there is a very good future in interdisciplinary research between demography and geographic information systems," Urich adds.

Solid academic credentials, matched by performance, attracted the big league, making up for the local government’s benign neglect.

Thus, the US National Academy of Sciences, the United Nations, World and Asian Development Banks and the Ford and Mellon Foundations backed the OPS, especially the CLHNS. Nutrition Institute director (former Cebu mayor) Florentino Solon and the University of North Carolina helped the launch.

Unique laboratory

This "Queen City of the South" provided a unique laboratory. In less than a decade, Metro Cebu’s population "imploded" by 34 percent. Yet, only four percent never attended school. And only half of households have piped water. A dismal 65 percent of homes have water-sealed toilets.

Child malnutrition cuts a savage swatch. "Stunting is highly prevalent among Cebu children," the World Health Organization notes. It increases dramatically in the fourth to 12th month of an infant’s life.

"By age two, about 69 percent of rural children, and 62 percent of those in urban areas, are stunted," the UN agency adds.

Majority of CLHNS respondents participated in the follow-up study in 1991 – when the kids were aged eight – and, again, in 2001. Resurveys will be conducted this year and, thereafter, in 2004.

Children of the ongoing 19-year CLHNS are "in translation to adulthood." Some dropped out of school. Others are now parents. And a few have died.

"In the last decade, important social, economic and health changes occurred in the Philippines," Adair and Popkin note. "These are reflected in the Cebu sample."

Among new issues are obesity, heart disease, domestic violence and adolescent sexuality. The population is also aging.

By mid-century, the number of 85-year-olds plus in less advanced countries like the Philippines, will be about seven percent, UP demography professor emeritus Mercedes Concepcion foresees.

Flieger stands in a long tradition of priest-scholars, an editorial of the Sun Star daily notes.

In that line, the editorial recalled, stand men like : Antonio Pigaffeta, a historian (who came to Cebu with Miguel de Legazpi); Padre Faura, an astronomer, Rudolf Rahman, an anthropologist; Miguel Selga, a mathematician; Horacio de la Costa, a historian; Catalino Arevalo, a theologian; and Frank Madigan, a demographer.

But do Cebu’s leaders today make this "remarkable self-effacing" scholarship the cutting edge for policy?, the paper asks. Failure to do so would be tantamount to "casting pearls before swine." – DEPTHnews