Keeping the SARS Outbreak Tracking Database in a Safe and Efficient Environment: Improving the Preventive Management of Infectious Diseases
The team’s database could be useful in providing verified information about large outbreaks and documenting the history of infectious diseases. Having transparent, complementary outbreak-reporting systems is an important goal, he adds. “The faster we find out there’s a real threat anywhere around the world and make that information available, the better off we all are.”
Improving worker safety has been another missed opportunity. Everyone in a workplace benefits if colleagues feeling flulike symptoms remain home. The provision of paid sick leave to workers is essential for the survival of the gig economy. Paid sick leave is particularly important in the health care, hospitality, public transportation and retail industries, where infections can most easily spread. Congress has not passed legislation requiring employers to give paid sick and family medical leave despite the large amount of data showing that there are respiratory infections at work.
Public health agencies will continue to play an important role in empowering locals and coordinating the response, Tomori says. Those living on the frontlines of novel diseases may be able to come up with the best early warning system. “If you take care of that first case, you can prevent an epidemic,” he says.
What African scientists think about pandemic-busting equipment for protecting themselves and their children in the era of innovation: How Africa should invest in health-care workers
The government has not yet ensured a stable domestic production capacity for protective equipment, such as N95 face coverings, gloves and disposable gowns.
Nor has it fixed the system of clinical research, which proved slow in generating useful results on a range of concerns, such as optimal vaccine schedules and the evaluation of drugs to lessen Covid symptoms and prevent hospitalizations. The reliable clinical results proving the benefits of steroids and the problems with hydroxychloroquine tended to come from Britain and other countries. Yet the National Institutes of Health have not revamped how they organize, fund and reward scientists for participating in large, pragmatic clinical trials, especially but not only in public health emergencies.
To better understand their grassroots effort, I spoke with Tomori; Jean-Vivien Mombouli, director of research and production at the Congolese National Public Health Laboratory; and Christian Happi, director of the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases in Nigeria. I want to learn what they think Africa should be doing to contain infectious diseases. They offered three key ideas: developing community-based disease surveillance; building capacity to produce protective gear, vaccines, and other pandemic-busting tools; and investing more in health-care workers.
Nonetheless, Tomori rejects the notion that Western philanthropy is the answer. “Don’t buy the story that Africa is poor,” he says. We’re not poor; we are not making good use of what we have.
The African scientists are tired of their countries’ inadequate responses to pathogens and are advocating for improved protection against pathogens on the continent.
There is not a single physician per 1,000 people in 44 of Africa’s 47 countries, with the lowest being Niger at 0.035 physicians per 1,000. If you include nurses and midwives in the estimate, Africa’s density increases slightly but only to 1.55 health-care workers per 1,000.
The Congolese’s worst nightmare — surviving an epidemic with vaccines and vaccines in the Likouala swamp – “the playground for pathogens”
The most notorious example was during the West African epidemic, when it took nearly three months for the disease to be identified. WHO reported that the country took so long because “Clinicians had never managed cases. No laboratory had ever diagnosed a patient specimen. No government had ever witnessed the social and economic upheaval that can accompany an outbreak of this disease.” The virus was “primed to explode” when it was finally identified as the deadliest disease in the world.
One of the poorer, least developed regions of the country is the Likouala Prefecture, a swampy area in the north of the country. He says that Likouala is a “paradise for pathogens,” with everything from the disease causingbacteria treponema to the viral disease Rift Valley Fever. He says something terrible is going to come from that area. It is only a matter of time without proper pathogen monitoring.
“They are not like that when you tell them the truth.” They ask tough questions,” Mombouli says about his fellow Congolese. “But once they get it, they transmit the information and really have proper behavior.” According to Mombouli, enlisting the active support and vigilance of community members can enable early disease detection and containment.
Mombouli thinks that the entire process of manufacturing should be called a “value chain” and should be the subject of an epidemic on the continent. There are a few African manufacturers who have experience making vaccines from start to finish, including the Biovac Institute in South Africa which produces a hepatitis B vaccine.
A resurgence in vaccine development was brought about by COVID-19. New vaccines are in the pipeline for many diseases. We have an opportunity to capitalize on the latest methods and a sense of urgency. We can’t continue closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. We have failed if we persist in relying on a market-based model that only produces millions of injections after an epidemic is under way.
“If the company leaves we go back to square one,” he said. Aspen Pharmacare may shut down its South African plant due to lack of demand because of hesitancy and difficulties in distributing the vaccine, as one example.
Undoubtedly, this will take time, with Afrigen expected to enter clinical trials later this year and vaccine approval coming in 2024, but much can be done in the interim. Tomori says that African countries can see other aspects of the value chain where they can contribute immediately. One can make a variety of items, like glass and rubber vials, rubber stoppers, and testing swabs. Each country doesn’t need to produce everything end-to-end, but Tomori says they should all be starting somewhere instead of patiently waiting for international aid.
Things are starting to change. Namibia, for instance, is one of four African countries that has surpassed the WHO threshold — with 10.28 workers per 1,000.
Admittedly, this policy helps improve only the efficiency of Namibia’s health-care system without increasing the number of providers. But in 2010, the University of Namibia established the country’s first school of medicine and has since trained hundreds of practicing doctors “who can respond to the healthcare needs of the Namibian people and are advocates for the poor, underserved and marginalised in our society,” according to associate dean Felicia Christians. A call from Namibia’s founding president to invest 50% of the national budget in education and health care emphasizes the country’s steadfast commitment to progress.
It’s crucial to continue constructing more medical institutions such as the Ugandan General Electric (GE) healthcare Skills and training Institute and the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda, but there must also be focus on retention.
In a 2011 study in the British Medical Journal, it was estimated that sub-Saharan African countries lost $2 billion (in terms of returns on educational investment) because doctors trained on the continent moved abroad. “Africa has to look inward and start paying people the salary they deserve if they want them not to leave the continent for somewhere else,” she asserts. As one example, the Zimbabwean Nurses Association says that most nurses in the country earn only $53 a month, a salary lower than the World Bank’s international poverty line.
This wouldn’t necessarily stop the exportation of health-care workers, but having the West fork over the money could help African countries replenish their workforce. “People should be honest enough to say that you cannot deplete a continent of its own resources,” Happi says.
That’s not to say the partnerships should not be pursued. The laboratory director of the Harvard AIDS Institute Partnership and a research associate at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health was the first to identify the omicron variant. In hospitals all over the world, they deployed COVID-19 tests before any of the U.S. hospital had them, thanks to the work of both Broad Institute Computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti and Happi. The $200 million Paul E. Farmer Scholarship Fund will support students at the University of Global Health Equity in order to educate future health care leaders in Africa.
Simar Bajaj, the third leading cause of death in the United States, is not a threat to everyone, but a privilege to treat everybody as low risk
A American journalist who writes for a number of newspapers, including The Atlantic, TIME, Guardian, and Washington Post, is called Simar Bajaj. At Harvard University, he is studying the history of science and chemistry while working as a research fellow. You can follow him on social media.
That is a good deal, of course. It also means that a twice-boosted 87-year-old is at a higher risk of dying from Covid than a never-vaccinated 70 year-old. Some real risk is what it is. It is now clear that the levels of American deaths are a consequence of the unvaccinated, and that they are anemic of the old.
One answer is that as a country, we prefer just to not see those deaths at all, regarding a baseline of several hundred deaths a day as a sort of background noise or morbid but faded wallpaper. We don’t need to understand who is dying or why in part because we don’t want to reckon with the fact that around 300 Americans are now dying from Covid-19 every day, at a rough pace of about 100,000 per year, making it the country’s third leading cause of death. This is normalization at work, but it is also a familiar pattern: We don’t exactly track the ups and downs of cancer or heart disease either.
The picture that resulted was a huge relief to most of us, without being misleading; Vaccination and natural immunity had dramatically reduced the country’s mortality risk. But while it’s comforting to believe that protection is a choice, for some populations it isn’t. In moving from treating everyone as high-risk to treating everyone as low-risk, we neglected to consider the difference between the two: if the average American reduced his or her chances of dying by a factor of 5 or 10, 300 or more, we wouldn’t have moved quickly.
What are you waiting for in China? The impact of the zero-COVID policy and mobile phone data on a long-line residential building in Beijing
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.
The disease is continuing to cause devastation. One of the last countries to make changes in response to the fast spreading Omicron variant is China. Scenes are similar to what Omicron did in Hong Kong nearly a year ago. China might have seen widespread transmission regardless of whether President Xi Jinping had dropped the zero-COVID policy in December. There are modelling that suggest the country faces the risk of up to one million deaths over the next year.
The mobile itinerary card health tracking function is going to be removed the following day.
The system uses people’s cell phone data to track their travel history over the past 14 days, in order to identify those who have been to a city that is considered high-risk.
Many researchers agree with the WHO’s assessment. “The WHO can’t say that the public-health emergency is over when you’ve got millions of cases and you’ve got thousands of deaths a day,” says Salim Abdool Karim, an epidemiologist who advises the South African government on COVID-19 and directs the Durban-based Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa. The removal of the zero-COVID policy in China at the end of last year has resulted in a spike in infections and deaths.
One note seen on a residential building in Beijing is indicative of the larger situation, reading: “Due to the severe epidemic situation in recent days, the number of employees who can come to work is seriously insufficient, and the normal operation of the apartment has been greatly affected and challenged.”
The news outlet China Youth Daily reported on long lines at a Beijing clinic that were documented by them on Friday, and cited experts calling for residents to not visit hospitals unless necessary.
The capital was grappling with a surge in emergency calls from residents with mild or no symptoms and a hospital official appealed to residents in such cases not to call the city’s emergency services line.
The daily volume of emergency calls had surged from its usual 5,000 to more than 30,000 in recent days, Chen Zhi, chief physician of the Beijing Emergency Center said, according to official media.
Zero Covid Impact Beijing Intl Hickenk-mic: A Tale of Two Cities and One Face: The Effect of the Clebschitz Pandemic in 2020
Even if prevention and control were strong, it wouldn’t be easy to completely cut off transmission chains during the Pandemic in 2020 according to the public voice since the beginning.
The rapid rollback of testing nationwide and the shift by many people to use antigen tests at home has also made it difficult to gauge the extent of the spread, with official data now appearing meaningless.
Last Wednesday, top health officials made a sweeping rollback of the mass testing, centralized quarantine, and health code tracking rules that it had relied on to control viral spread. Some aspects of those measures, such as health code use in designated places and central quarantine of severe cases, as well as home isolation of cases, remain.
Outside experts have warned that China may not be prepared for the expected surge of cases, after its decision to lift measures after protests against the policy.
While Omicron may cause relatively milder disease compared to earlier variants, even a small number of serious cases could have a significant impact on the health system in a country of 1.4 billion.
With the Chinese New Year coming around, and people going to see elderly relatives, it is important for the government to focus on booster shots, especially for the elderly and others most at risk.
Measures to be undertaken include increasing ICU wards and beds, enhancing medical staff for intensive care and setting up more clinics for fevers, China’s National Health Commission said in a statement.
Experts warn that there is a lack of experience with the virus and that a recent shift in tone could push some people who are not in critical need to seek medical care.
Bob Li, who is a graduate student in Beijing, was positive for the virus and his mother worried about him all night. “She finds the virus a very, very scary thing,” Li said.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/12/china/china-zero-covid-impact-beijing-intl-hnk-mic/index.html
The American Response to the COVID-19 Wake-up Call: Vaccines, Phenomenology, and State-Dependent Policy
China’s market watchdog said on Friday that there was a “temporary shortage” of some “hot-selling” drugs and vowed to crackdown on price gouging, while major online retailer JD.com last week said it was taking steps to ensure stable supplies after sales for certain medications surged 18 times that week over the same period in October.
A Beijing doctor was quoted in a state media article saying people with no symptoms after testing positive for Covid-19 would not need to take medication to recover.
“People with asymptomatic inflections do not need medication at all. It is enough to rest at home, maintain a good mood and physical condition,” Li Tongzeng, chief infectious disease physician at Beijing You An Hospital, said in an interview linked to a hashtag viewed more than 370 million times since Friday.
With effective, available vaccines against devastating diseases, governments could prevent escalation through contact tracing and ring vaccine: in the case of epidemics, perhaps a few dozen contacts of each affected person could be vaccined. Drug companies don’t make much money by producing the small amount of vaccine needed to prevent spread, and donor governments don’t want their money spent on preventive vaccines.
In Nature seven years ago, I warned of this problem. Yet despite the COVID-19 wake-up call, this remains one of the biggest chinks in our pandemic-preparedness armour.
It doesn’t describe the situation. Preparing preventive vaccines for a few million dollars per batch should be seen as a small insurance policy to avoid a repeat of the US$12 trillion the world just spent on COVID-19.
The possibility of a second pandemic raises the obvious question of whether we have learned anything from the last one. Is there any reason to expect that even with new political leadership, the country’s response to a new global outbreak — of H5N1 or something else — would be more coherent or more coordinated? To the contrary. Contemplating the possibility of a new pandemic in the near future suggests all the ways that America, in its rush to return to normal, failed to do all the things that might have secured a lasting normalcy.
The countries with the best economies should lead. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, based in Oslo, and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, based in New York City, are examples of agencies that should be funded fully and have close collaboration with government research agencies.
This month, Anthony Fauci will step down as director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) after more than 38 years in the post and 54 years at its parent organization, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has been the head of the institute since 1999 and has overseen its research, response to the HIV-AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19Pandemic. During the Pandemic, he became a household name because he was revered as a trusted source of advice by many and despised by others, including Donald Trump, who disliked his advice as being overly complicated. On 11 December, he was attacked on Twitter by Elon Musk, who took over the social-media platform in October. Fauci spoke to Nature about Musk’s comments and his legacy.
One of the most important is in the area of HIV. In 1981 when we first became aware of the cases of HIV, it was a mysterious disease that was killing most of the people who had it. It was a difficult time for me and anyone else who worked in infectious diseases. We went from not knowing what was killing all these mostly young gay men to getting a diagnostic test and an entire series of drugs within a few years, which have transformed the lives of people with HIV. We also have developed highly effective prevention methods with pre-exposure prophylaxis and [can treat] people who are infected, bringing the level of virus to below detectable levels, so they don’t transmit it to anybody else.
One of the holy grails of infectious-disease research is a safe and effective vaccine for HIV. We have made great strides in the advancement of therapies for treatment and prevention of disease. There is a vaccine that could be safe and effective. So that’s one of the things we look forward to. It is possible to have a cure for HIV in which you can have suppression or elimination of the virus in the absence of any therapy. We have not reached that point yet, but that is an aspirational goal.
Yes, we do. You do it by just doing it. It isn’t hard to integrate a discipline of social sciences into the discipline of developing vaccines. It is very disturbing that, in our country, we have 68% of the total population vaccinated with the primary vaccine for COVID. Of those, only half have received a single boost. Only 8% of the eligible population has received an effective BA.4/5 bivalent updated booster. That is very troubling and embarrassing for us because we have less enthusiasm for a life-saving vaccine.
I don’t have a Twitter account or Facebook account unless I know about the COVID-19 outbreak and how it affects mental health
The importance of mental health and paying attention to the stresses caused by the swine flu has been brought to the foreground by COVID-19. [Their] growth and development has been [shaped] not only by missing in-person school, but also by the stress of losing grandparents and parents, and seeing the disruption of the normal flow of their childhood. All of that has had a major negative impact on mental health.
That’s impossible to answer. A lot of the world’s public-health efforts are hindered if there are countries that are not transparent. I hope that all countries of the world come to a realization that there has to be transparency and cooperation in everything that is done, because there is no such thing as a flu epidemic that is spread by the respiratory route. We saw that very painfully with how COVID spread throughout the world and has already resulted in close to seven million deaths, and that’s probably a gross underestimate.
I don’t care about that, Max, and I don’t feel I have to respond. I don’t have a social media presence. I don’t have a Twitter account. A lot of that stuff is just a cesspool of misinformation, and I don’t waste a minute worrying about it.
Of course it’s at risk. That’s why I have armed federal agents with me all the time. That stirs up a lot of hate in people who have no idea why they’re hating — they’re hating because somebody like that is tweeting about it.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04432-7
The Covid-19 Season is Coming: The White House and the Support of Covidtests.gov in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Maricopa
The degree of contribution you can make to society by becoming a public servant is priceless, so I encourage them not to be deterred. It’s really extraordinary. It overcomes and counters all of the other bad stuff. We are going through attacks on public-health officials. But the satisfaction and the accomplishments you can [achieve] in the field are great. All that other stuff is superseded by it.
When you thought it would be safe to go with your Aunt Mary for a holiday visit, the flu and theRSV reared their heads, and Covid-19 numbers are creeping up again.
Health officials are emphasizing the availability of the protective measures, tests and treatments that they say will be key to preventing a repeat of the Covid-19 surges of the past two winters.
Case numbers are now below those of earlier waves, but about 14% of the US population is in an area that meets the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s criteria for a “high” Covid-19 community level, up from less than 5% last week. New York City, Los Angeles County and Phoenix’s Maricopa County are among those areas.
Covid-19 hospitalizations have been on the rise since early November, and older people are bearing the brunt of these serious illnesses. Hospitals are more likely to admit seniors than any other age group.
The US had more deaths related to Covid-19 in the first week of December. Even with vaccines and treatments widely available, the CDC reported nearly 3,000 deaths for that week.
The White House said Thursday that this Covid-19 season does not have to be like last winter’s, when there was a large spike in cases with the rise of the Omicron coronavirus variant.
The White House has the infrastructure, know how and the tools to handle the situation, according to the White House Covid-19 response coordinator.
The Biden administration has been in daily contact with state and local public health leaders, monitoring hospital levels, he said. And the federal government has medical personnel, supplies and other resources ready if states and communities need them.
The government is putting Covidtests.gov back in action to give more Americans access to free tests. Each household in the US can order up to four at home tests that ship as early as next week.
Only about 14% of eligible Americans have gotten an updated Covid-19 booster, and 1 in 5 people in the US remain completely unvaccinated, according to the CDC.
Treatments can reduce a person’s risk of being hospitalized or dying from Covid-19, but Paxlovid works best if started within days of when symptoms appear.
If people used those tools, we could make it through the Covid-19 season.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/health/covid-19-christmas-2022/index.html
The 2022 COVID-19 Pandemic: Review of Current State and Outlook in the Continuum and Future Directions in Vaccines
The district will require children to wear masks for 10 days when they come back from winter break in order to control the spread of respiratory illnesses.
The CDC recommends masking for anyone who’s on public transportation. It suggests wearing one in high Covid-19 communities in other public settings. People who are at high risk of severe illness are urged to wear masks even in areas with only medium community levels.
In many places, life took on a semblance of pre‑COVID normality in 2022, as countries shed pandemic-control measures. Governments ended lockdowns, reopened schools and scaled back or abandoned mask-wearing mandates. International travel resumed.
There were also optimistic statements. In January, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen declared that SARS‑CoV-2 no longer poses a threat to society. In September, US President Joe Biden remarked during an interview that the pandemic was over. The director- general of the World Health Organization has expressed hope that the global emergency designation for COVID-19 will end in 2023.
Elsewhere, repeated surges in infection and death are giving way to a constant thrum of loss, as well as debilitation caused by long COVID. The fights against AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis have been affected by a focus on COVID-19. Although precise counts are difficult to obtain, overall death rates in many countries remain higher than before COVID-19 hit.
One path to renewing vaccination efforts lies with technology. The development of vaccines that are mucosal is under way. These are designed to be delivered through the nose or mouth and it’s hoped they can trigger sterilizing immunity that blocks transmission — not just severe illness. India has introduced a two-dose primary vaccine, and China has also approved an inhalable booster dose. Iran and Russia have also each approved a mucosal vaccine. But researchers are awaiting data to check whether any of these deliver on their promise of stopping SARS-CoV-2.
The World Health Organization decided to put out a draft of the first legally binding treaty that they can use to ensure that vaccines, drugs and diagnostics are more equitable around the world during the next Pandemic.
The report rates of H5N1 outbreaks in Eastern Europe are not comparable in all regions, and WHO is building a standard database to 2021
776 outbreaks of the H5N1 variant of flu have been documented since 1996, and it was found that it was reported at the highest rate in most years.
The most reported epidemics were China, Saudi Arabia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, each with a total of 262, and all of which contained at least one case of flu. Few reports were associated with countries in Eastern Europe.
Katz says that the diversity in reporting patterns results from the disparate surveillance capacities of various countries, along with the diseases that national health authorities prioritize and, ultimately, what the WHO decides to concern itself with. “There are a lot of humans involved here, and humans are making different calls,” she says. For instance, Ebola is reported much more often than other haemorrhagic fevers that periodically erupt in Africa.
The database will allow researchers to look at the factors that determine how much money is spent to suppress a specific outbreak, or how external circumstances such as conflicts or weather events affect them, says Katz. However, the study notes that DON reports do not mention all known outbreaks in every region.
A spokesperson for the WHO said it is drafting a publication detailing its decision-making process and criteria for DON reports, as well as restructuring its website to make the reports easier to search. The agency adds that it standardized the structure and format of the DON reports in 2021 — after the period that Katz’s study analysed. The WHO wrote that it is a learning organization and this also applies to the DON.
What is the WHO’s definition for a PHEIC? No COVID-19 epidemic is not a public health emergency, says Preben Aavitsland
The next opportunity for the WHO to lift the emergency designation will come in April — and some say that should be the end of it. A PHEIC is defined by the International Health Regulations (IHRs) as “an extraordinary event” that risks spreading an infectious disease internationally.
How the WHO labels the outbreak is important because it sends a signal to the global community. What is the signal it is sending to the travel agency? What signal is it sending to manufacturers of new drugs and vaccines?
That definition doesn’t really hold true for COVID-19 anymore, says Preben Aavitsland, director for surveillance at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo. The disease has spread to other parts of the world. When the virus is present in most places, there is no extra risk for trade or travel.
The WHO didn’t ever declare the COVID 19 outbreak a public health emergency, says a WHO spokesman. The organization used the term Pandemic to describe the situation.
The zero draft of the WHO World Health Organization treaty on pandemics and equity: Interpretation and implications for poultry and vaccines, and with an application to bird flu
Kelley Lee is the science co-director of the Pacific Institute on Pathogens, Pandemics and Society in Burnaby, Canada. The tooth and spine aren’t up to par to ensure that we have a better response next time.
WHO member states will now begin debating the terms of the document — known as the zero draft — at a series of meetings, the first of which will begin later this month. Researchers expect the negotiations to be contentious, and some of the language is likely to be watered down before the agreement is adopted in 2024.
There are some positive signs when it comes to bird flu, including a federal discussion of a mass poultry-vaccine program and the rapid availability of existing vaccines for humans. But each of these projects could take at least six months, and almost certainly we would find ourselves wasting the early stage of a new pandemic — and possibly more than that — repeating debates over the last one. There are fault lines already as the country’s response to the crisis went too far on social media to mock suggestions that any of the same measures would be imposed to stop a new outbreak.
A key focus of the zero draft is equity. Articles in the treaty include establishing a global network for the supply and distribution of ingredients used to produce drugs; strengthening research and the development of vaccines and therapeutics; and sharing that knowledge with the world.
Parties should commit to giving no less than 5% of their health budget for prevention and response if they sign the treaty. And they should earmark an as-yet-unspecified percentage of their gross domestic product, in particular to support developing countries in preparing for pandemics. If agreed, Moon says this would be the first instance she knows of in which governments commit to setting aside a specific amount of money for international aid in a treaty. I don’t think it is likely, but it is a bold proposal.
The current treaty is not strong enough to prevent countries that sign it from ignoring the rules when a disease strikes. The document is intended to be legally binding, but in some key instances, the text avoids strong language, such as ‘shall’ and ‘must’, instead using fuzzier terms such as ‘encourage’ and ‘promote’, say researchers. “It’s still quite heavily reliant on voluntary compliance,” says Lee.
Layth Hanbali, health-policy analyst at Spark Street Advisors is based in the occupied Palestinian territories, and he says that the negotiations to ensure compliance have been pushed back to after the treaty comes into force. The treaty document will have nothing to do with the promises states will make unless there is a mechanism in place to hold them accountable.
But Phelan says it is important not to underestimate the value of the treaty-building process itself. Discussion and debates over the provisions will help build trust between governments and establish international solidarity.
Building a Global Health Emergency Corps: Training Firefighters to Survive Epidemics in the Era of Global Warm-Hot. Diseases
Imagine there’s a small fire in your kitchen. Your fire alarm goes off, warning everyone nearby about the danger. Someone calls 911. You try to put out the fire yourself, and you might have a fire extinguisher under the sink. If that doesn’t work, you know how to safely evacuate. A fire truck is already there when you get outside. The firefighters use the water in front of your house to extinguish the flames before they spread to any of your neighbors homes.
I’m optimistic about a network that the W.H.O. and its partners are building called the Global Health Emergency Corps. The world’s top health emergency leaders are going to be ready for the next Pandemic. The Emergency Corps will conduct drills to practice for fires just as firefighters conduct drills to respond to a fire. The exercises will make sure that everyone — governments, health care providers, emergency health workers — knows what to do when a potential outbreak emerges.