Institute of Development Studies

Responding to Pandemic Threats

20 April 2010 - Ian Scoones

This week delegates gather for the International Ministerial Conference on Animal and Pandemic Influenza in Hanoi, Vietnam. The past year has seen the H1N1 (swine flu)  pandemic sweep the world and avian influenza remains endemic in a number of countries, particularly in Asia. Fortunately neither has resulted in the ‘big one': a pandemic on a scale and intensity which results in massive human mortality, but this is no argument for complacency. Pandemic threats - from influenza or from other sources - remain as present as ever. Building our resilience to emerging infectious disease impacts, particularly in places where they are most likely to arise, must remain top of global health security priorities.

A new book from the STEPS Centre ‘Pathways to Sustainability' book series - Avian Influenza: Science, Policy and Politics - lays out the lessons from the international avian influenza response. The book is based on an analysis of the politics of policy process, both at the international level, and in four countries in Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. It suggests a way forward based on One World, One Health, the global avian influenza response agenda developed by agencies including the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).

Future challenges

A key challenge for the future is finding ways of encouraging greater collaboration between the wildlife, livestock and human health sectors. This is because it is at the interface between animals (both wild and domestic) and humans that new disease risks lie. A focus on the socio-ecological drivers of disease is a core agenda for the STEPS Centre's research on epidemics, and central to new collaborations with the London International Development Centre and Cambridge University funded through the Environmental and Social Ecology of Human Infectious Diseases Programme (ESEI).

Yet too often disciplinary, professional and organisational silos mean that disease emergence is not spotted early enough and so diseases spread, often very rapidly given the way connections exist in a globalised world. Encouraging collaboration is at the heart of the One World, One Health approach, and is top of the agenda for the Hanoi ministerial conference. A recent high-level meeting at Chatham House in London - part of a joint initiative with the STEPS Centre - focused on this issue, and resulted in a set of key recommendations for discussion in Hanoi.

As the new STEPS Centre book highlights, however, one of the key lessons from the international response to avian influenza is that the existing organisational architecture is inadequate. Developed post 1945, the international institutions have mandates appropriate to a very different world with very different challenges. No-one seems to be in charge of the ‘pump handle' - the critical control point which affects disease emergence and spread. Novel financing and governance arrangements are urgently required. Too often we see separate laboratories being established for human and animal diseases, parallel training programmes being run for medics and vets and overlapping responses unfolding on the ground sponsored by different agencies. While coordination mechanisms exist, and have certainly improved, they often have little clout in the face of sectorally-focused interests, budgets and mandates.

A major rethink of the incentives and institutions is required - and Hanoi must be the moment to move from rhetoric to action. We have been lucky - so far - with avian and swine flu. This will not remain the case.

Ian Scoones is co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre and IDS Professorial Fellow.

Image: Ludger Vorfeld/iStockphoto