Health experts: world insufficiently prepared for a new pandemic

Countries still need to step up their games to cope with pandemics,. Keystone / Laurent Gillieron

The world remains ill-prepared for a possible new health crisis or pandemic. This is the conclusion reached by the independent Observatory for Health Crisis Preparedness in a report on Monday.

The World Health Organisation and the World Bank set it up in 2018, among other things, in response to a devastating Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The observatory is intended to analyse preparations in the world and make recommendations. 

A lot has been done in the wake of the corona pandemic, it notes, but some countries have scaled back their precautions in order to be able to react quickly to similar crises and in other countries there has been little progress.

The organisation makes several suggestions to improve crisis preparedness worldwide. Countries need to strengthen their surveillance in order to be able to detect new diseases at an early stage. To achieve this, data collection and analysis capacity would need to be improved. 

Poorer countries needed financial support and debt deferral to provide resources. A planned fund with $10 billion dollars for pandemic prevention and preparation urgently needs to be financed.

The research and development of new drugs should not be concentrated in a few countries, as was the case with the corona pandemic. Civil society must be better involved in all preparations.

The organisation’s co-chair, former Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, said a lack of trust between countries and between citizens and authorities makes good pandemic preparedness difficult. “We call on world leaders to overcome these divisions and chart a new path based on a shared recognition that our future security depends on meaningful reform and the highest level of political commitment to emergency health preparedness.”

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