By Emmanuel T. Erediano
Variety News Staff

A seriously ill two-year-old boy suffering from kidney failure and pneumonia had to wait for another day and several hours at the Commonwealth Health Center after Continental Airlines refused to allow him to board a flight on Wednesday to Manila, the Philippines.
The boy needs special equipment for his dialysis and was on medical referral to a Manila hospital.
He was scheduled to leave on a Continental flight at 6 p.m., Wednesday, but the airline did not allow the patient to board the plane.
The boy’s father, Jeffrey Tenorio, 30, told Variety in an interview yesterday that the airline wanted more exact information about his son’s medical condition.
Tenorio, who works at Saipan Stevedore in safety maintenance, said he was told that his son failed to meet the airline’s requirements.
This reporter was unable to get a comment from Continental as of press time yesterday.
The boy has been confined at CHC since being diagnosed with kidney failure and pneumonia. His mother brought him to the hospital for the third time last weekend due to fever.
Tenorio said that after the attending physicians determined his son’s condition, a medical referral to St. Luke’s Medical Center in Manila was immediately worked out.
The father said he was told that CHC’s dialysis equipment was suited only for adult patients.
Due to the possibility that Continental Airlines might again refuse to board the boy, an insurance company managed to work out a referral to a hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The CHC medical referral office also managed to find a military aircraft that is coming all the way from Africa to fly the boy to Hawaii.
As of press time, the boy was still in CHC’s intensive care unit where the doctors had no choice but to give the boy dialysis treatment using of the equipment for adults.
Rep. Ray N. Yumul, Ind.-Saipan, expressed disappointment at the kind of “business decision” Continental made.
“It is very disturbing,” he said, adding that Continental appears to lack compassion for a critically ill child.
Yumul, who is a cousin of the boy’s father, said it is fortunate that somebody at CHC was able “to arrange the boy’s medical referral and an alternative means to bring him to a hospital with a suitable facility that will save the boy’s life.”
The military plane was expected to arrive yesterday, and the boy was scheduled to leave Saipan for Hawaii at 1 a.m. this morning.
Yumul said he will look into the possibility of legislation requiring airlines to allow passengers with medical emergencies to board their flights.