Expert calls for a national disease centre to prepare for next pandemic
A NATIONAL centre for infectious diseases would be the ‘key’ to responding effectively to ‘inevitable’ future pandemics, a leading expert has said.
Trinity College Professor of Experimental Immunology Kingston Mills said a centre could draw on the country’s expertise and the lessons learned during Covid would be a significant resource in future public health emergencies.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘There were rumblings that Science Foundation Ireland were going to fund a North-South centre, but the funding for that seems to have disappeared.
‘I don’t think we need to point fingers’
‘A centre would be really important to have a collection of scientists and clinicians working on infectious diseases, immunology and virology in a focused centre that would have this expertise.
‘Right now we have a scattering of people around the country. So having a centre, where you have all of that expertise would be key, in my view, to be ready for the next pandemic.’
The UK is investing heavily in research in this area and is funding the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London.
The centre has 200 researchers looking at various areas including outbreak analysis and modelling, global health analytics, vaccines, and antimicrobial resistance.
The MRC Centre states: ‘We are one of the largest centres of infectious disease modelling expertise. This gives us a unique capacity to respond to emerging threats such as Ebola and Zika with real-time analysis and predictive modelling – and to provide timely evidence-based input to urgent policy questions for major endemic diseases such as HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.’
Professor Mills also said the review of Ireland’s response to the Covid emergency should not require those in charge to be held accountable for mistakes that were made, but rather to provide lessons for the future.
He told the MoS: ‘Mistakes were made [but] I don’t think we need to point figures at individuals necessarily.
‘Dynamics were changing almost daily. We could have responded quicker with regard to mask wearing, antigen testing in particular, heterologous [mixed dose] vaccination. We could have responded quicker to international evidence. But by and large we responded well and if you look at our death rate ratio to our number of cases, it’s one of the lowest in the world.
‘The review should help us prepare for the next one. We need to be prepared for the next infectious disease pandemic that’s going to hit us.
‘I mean, we’ve already had some evidence that there might be a flu pandemic. Are we ready for that? There’s talk of hepatitis in children. What’s causing that? Are we ready for something like that?’
Alongside the development of a national centre of infectious diseases, Mr Mills said he is hoping to see modified vaccinations that target Omicron and Delta variants.
Drug companies Pfizer and Moderna are in the process of developing modified vaccines, which should be available towards the end of the year.
He said: ‘If they’re available in the autumn, we need to get them before winter. Because inevitably there could be another wave in the winter. That could be because waning immunity is an issue with all of these vaccines. There’s no question about that.’
‘We could have responded quicker’