Pandemic could catch NZ napping, researchers warn
New Zealand isn’t prepared enough for a major pandemic, which could strike as swiftly as an earthquake and bring the country to its knees, scientists say.
The Ministry of Health recently updated its strategy and is now reviewing its readiness plans in the run-up to the centenary of the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more than 8600 New Zealanders and 500 million people worldwide.
But the co-author of a recent article in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health sees much more room for improvement, particularly with massive and modern threats posed by antimicrobial resistance, climate change and rising populations.
“For a small country, we are in danger of making things very difficult for ourselves,” said Otago University public health expert Michael Baker.
He believes our capacity to deal with the threat has become fractured and eroded over the past 20 years.
The article, co-authored by Otago colleagues Julia Scott and Associate Professor Nick Wilson, set out ways health authorities could better prevent, detect or respond to a pandemic, which were suggested during a workshop with front-line officials.
They included completing a plan to deal with antimicrobial resistance, with more collaboration between human and animal health sectors; creating labs for highly pathogenic organisms; and developing real-time surveillance beyond notifiable diseases and influenza.
The authors said a new framework was needed to cover a broad range of emerging infectious diseases, especi- Professor ally those most likely to spread in our region, and target them in regular exercises.
Independent assessments were also needed of resources in New Zealand, and in lowand middle-income Pacific states.
Baker said legislation was now “horribly out of date”, some response efforts were split between agencies, and he questioned if authorities had the expertise in place to deal with a sudden pandemic.
“With earthquakes, you know they are going to happen, but you just don’t know when, or how big they’ll be — pandemics are very similar.”
The belief that New Zealand was somehow less exposed was proven wrong in 2009 when Rangitoto College students returned from Mexico with swine flu, making the country one of the first to be affected by what would become a global pandemic that killed more than 14,000.
Other pandemics, like the mosquito-spread Zika virus, had come unexpected by health authorities.
Conversely, antimicrobial resistance developed slowly but its impact could be discovered disastrously late.
“The most dramatic example I can think of is two years ago, when we woke and realised that a third of campylobacter cases across the country had been caused by a strain resistant to antibiotics.
“As best as we can tell, the threat of pandemic appears to be increasing, and that’s partly related to an increase in popu- lation growth and a long list of factors that are creating conditions that encourage emergence of new threats.”
There were thought to be 1400 different pathogens that affect humans, and, in the past few thousand years, most had crossed from animal “reservoirs” that carried them.
“There are still thousands of other microbes that can do that, so they are going to continue to surprise us.”
Among nine “high priority” pathogens short-listed by the World Health Organisation are filoviral diseases like Ebola, which killed more than 11,000 people recently, and highly pathogenic coronaviral diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars.
“But the good thing is we know from past events what works, and almost all pandemics are manageable if you have the capacity in place.”