Review of SFETP workshop lesson 1's reading materials

05 Jul 2022 Categorised under:  PrevMed

I am really excited to attend Prof Steven’s SFETP workshop this coming Saturday 9/7/22. This is a long awaited course for me, since I have read Prof Steven’s book 1 year ago to help supplement knowledge required for my clinical epidemiology work. Here I would like to review 2 papers given to us as readings for the first lesson of the workshop:

First paper: How better pandemic and epidemic intelligence will prepare the world for future threats by Oliver W. Morgan, et al.

TLDR: Pandemic and epidemic intelligence requires (1) Modern approach to surveillance and risk assessment. (2) Improved trust and cooperation between stakeholders and society.

Key points:

• Traditional surveillance approaches: People visiting healthcare facilities, clinical assessment and diagnosis from notes, laboratory confirmation of pathogen, genome sequencing, mortality estimation, active and passive case finding
• Modern surveillance approaches: Detection of public health signals from social media, alternate sources of data from police records, occupational health, environmental reports, animal deaths, etc., geospatial and remote sensing from mobility data, crowdsourcing of open sourced case based data, wearables and internet of things.
• Challenges in pandemic and epidemic intelligence: data fragmentation, multiple data sources, licenceship, ownership, cybersecurity risks, analysis challenges, increased computing requirements, organizational challenges and highly diverse multi disciplinary team
• The establishment of the World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic hub to build modern disease surveillance capabilities and global trust architecture to better deal with future global health threats.

Thoughts:

• This is an opinion paper by authors from the WHO. Hence, paper is directed at WHO’s response to modern pandemic and epidemic intelligence challenges: The pandemic hub.
• Nevertheless, the paper offers a succinct summary of: (1) The traditional and modern surveillance approaches. (2) The challenges these approaches face in gathering pandemic and epidemic intelligence.

Second paper: Singapore Statement on Global Health Strategy by Adam Kamradt Scott, Yik Ying Teo, Rebecca Katz

TLDR: Freedom from the consequences of infectious disease requires dedicated, sustained and cooperative efforts across all levels of society and government, both locally and internationally.

Key points:

• 7 statements on Sydney’s global health security: 1. Inclusive, equitable and data drive interventions. 2. Linking prevention, detection and response capabilities to health system strengthening and universal health coverage. 3. Compliance with International Health Regulations and other associated agreements. 4. Action and engagement with all sectors. 5. Embrace the One Health approach. 6. Partnering between low and high resourced countries. 7. Sustainable efforts.
• Singapore’s declaration: 1. Sustainable only when global health security is embedded in universal health systems. 2. Health emergency, preparedness and response workforce must be strengthened by multisectoral, multidisciplinary expertise. 3. Enhanced surveillance of animal and environmental conditions. 4. Governments must sustainably finance, build, strengthen, practice preparedness and response capabilities in adherence to International Health Regulations. 5. Technical, social, economic and political measures are to be taken to reduce the impact of disease. Particularly in improving health literacy and reducing misinformation.

Thoughts

• Singapore’s declaration seeks to map out how the Sydney’s Global Health Security’s statements can be executed.
• One of the key thrusts in this paper is on the emphasis of concerted and cooperative action across all levels of society at the country level and all countries’ governments at the international level.