By Emmanuel T. Erediano
Variety News Staff

CONTINENTAL Micronesia says it did not allow a two-year-old boy to board of plane last week because he was in a medical condition that was not sufficiently stable for a commercial flight.
Walter B. Dias, a staff vice president for sales and marketing, said in an e-mail that a ventilator, which the patient was required to have, was not available on the plane
Two-year-old Jun Tenorio, was scheduled to be evacuated to a hospital in Manila for dialysis treatment on Wednesday last week.
The boy, who is the son of Jeff and Hiroko Tenorio, has been suffering from kidney failure and pneumonia and was in need of a special type of dialysis equipment not available at the Commonwealth Health Center.
After Continental refused to board the young patient, the Commonwealth Health Center, Stay Well Insurance and Rep. Ray N. Yumul, Ind.-Saipan, succeeded in arranging an alternative aircraft and medical referral destination.
Yumul is the cousin of the boy’s father.
The boy was flown to Honolulu, Hawaii on a military aircraft that came all the way from Africa.
Public Health Deputy Secretary Joseph Santos confirmed that the boy’s family “could not meet (Continental’s) criteria.”
He did not allow this reporter to talk to any of the physicians who attended the young boy.
Santos said the hospital administration expressed gratitude to the military for flying the boy to Hawaii.
According to Dias, “transporting critically ill patients on commercial aircraft is not without additional medical risks and could result in further complications and even death,”
He said Continental takes its responsibility “very seriously, being among the few commercial airlines in the world that routinely transports medical patients on long-haul flights due to the poor conditions of the medical facilities at the places of origin, which we, as the region’s hometown airline, recognize.”
He said their commercial flights operate at over 30,000 feet and aircraft cabins must be pressurized in order to allow sufficient oxygen for people to breathe normally.
Commercial aircraft, he said, are typically pressurized at about 8,000 feet.
This, he said, is safe for healthy people but for critically ill passengers, “such an environment can be stressful and may cause additional health problems.”
For this reason, Dias said, they require medical patients to be stable prior to boarding.
Continental, he added, is “dedicated to providing special services to people in need throughout the region.”
“(But) we will not put those customers’ lives at risk by boarding them when they are not sufficiently medically stable to survive a commercial flight,” he said.