courtesy www.freefoto.com
Improving SE Asia pandemic planning
With the world bracing for the next influenza pandemic, many experts believe that it will originate in Southeast Asia. To help improve the region's preparedness for such an event, a US think-tank RAND team, led by Melinda Moore and David Dausey, is working with a consortium of partners in the region
The consortium, known as the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance (MBDS) project, is an ongoing collaboration among six nations—Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and China (Yunnan Province).
The MBDS is intended to strengthen regional cooperation in disease surveillance. Similar concerns about pandemic preparedness among nations in the Middle East led RAND to conduct a similar project at the invitation of a consortium of partners in that region, the Middle East Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance, a collaboration of Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. On March 10th, Moore was on Capitol Hill briefing experiences and findings from the work conducted in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
The work has four principal aims: (1) help public health and other relevant personnel practice their joint responses to a hypothetical pandemic situation; (2) identify areas for improvement; (3) strengthen relationships among personnel from public health and other response agencies; and (4) train staff.
To address these goals, RAND designed and conducted tabletop exercises, modeled on similar exercises that it has conducted extensively in the United States with federal, state, and local governments and a large private-sector organization. For the MBDS consortium, the researchers first developed and conducted tabletop exercises in individual countries.
They then collaborated with MBDS countries to design and conduct a regional exercise, the first of its kind. It involved 60 participants from a broad range of sectors in the six countries, plus 25 observers from technical and donor organizations. The exercise addressed three preparedness areas that had also been addressed in the country exercises: surveillance and information sharing, communication, and disease prevention and control.
The MBDS exercises are now complete. In the Middle East, the RAND team has conducted similar exercises in Jordan and Palestine (Israel has already completed its own). A regional planning exercise involving these three participants is scheduled for April 2008.
www.rand.org
