How prepared is the world for the next epidemic?
World Health Organization after the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Those evaluations have been going on since 2016, but the data contained in them, while public, are difficult to find.
Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for
Health Security, said the tool “shines a more clear light” on the results of those evaluations in a way that can “help sustain the attention of political leaders and donors”. The identified gaps will be easy for donors to under- stand and to address, he said.
Global health officials say it’s more important than ever for disease outbreaks to be stopped at their source before they become full-blown epidemics. In the US, many experts are worried about the Trump administration’s commitment to maintaining strong levels of funding for CDC’s efforts to fight infectious disease threats.
Only 430 million people, or 6 percent of the world’s population, live in the countries that are considered better prepared to prevent epidemics. (They include Australia, Belgium, Finland,Oman, South Korea, Slovenia, the United Arab Emirates and the US.) While those countries, highlighted in green, have scores above 80, no country has completed all the steps that are recommended.
But more than 60 percent of countries, representing nearly 5 billion people, have not volunteered to conduct these epidemic preparedness evalua- tions, including most of Europe, Russia, China, India and virtually all of South America.
Of all continents, Africa leads the world in terms of the number of countries that have completed these evaluations. But most of those countries, highlighted in red and yellow on the PreventEpidemics website, are not ready (red), or have work to do (yellow), to prepare for the next epidemic. Light grey means an evaluation is in progress, with no data available; and dark grey is unknown.
By the end of the year, 100 countries will have gone through this rigorous evaluation. “Progress assessing those gaps has been excellent,” Frieden said. “Progress fixing them, not so good.”
Nigeria, which has been battling outbreaks of yellow fever, monkey pox and Lassa virus, which can cause a lethal hemorrhagic fever resembling Ebola, is one of the countries identified by PreventEpidemics as not ready. Frieden’s group is helping Nigeria improve its disease surveillance by providing laptops and staff to the health ministry so its detection team gets better data.