HEALTH Preparing for pandemics could cost less than $1 each a year, review says

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-pandemics-idUSKCN0UR20C20160113

Health | Wed Jan 13, 2016 11:16am EST
Related: Health

Preparing for pandemics could cost less than $1 each a year, review says

LONDON | By Kate Kelland


Investing less than $0.72 a year for each person would make the world far more resilient to potentially devastating pandemics, according to a global health expert group convened in the wake of the Ebola crisis.

A report by the Commission on Creating a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future, published on Wednesday, said infectious diseases are as potentially dangerous to human life, health and society as match wars and natural disasters.

Pandemics cost the world more than 40 billion pounds ($58 billion) each year, the report estimated, yet preparations are chronically underfunded compared with other threats.

"Few global events match epidemics and pandemics in potential to disrupt human security and inflict loss of life and economic and social damage," said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust global health charity.

"Yet for many decades, the world has invested far less in preventing, preparing for and responding to these threats than in comparable risks to international and financial security."

The Wellcome Trust co-funded the review, which was coordinated by the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and several other organizations.

An Ebola epidemic killed more than 11,000 people and wreaked economic and social havoc when it swept through three countries in West Africa last year.

The world has faced several other infectious disease crises in the last 15 years, the report noted, including Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and the HIN1 flu pandemic.

The commission's experts estimated that at least one new disease pandemic will emerge in the next 100 years, with a 20 percent chance of four or more in that time.

"Pandemics don't respect national boundaries, so we have a common interest in strengthening our defenses," said Peter Sands of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for business and government at the Harvard Kennedy school, who chaired the commission.

Preventing and preparing for potentially catastrophic pandemics "is far more effective, and ultimately far less expensive, than reacting to them when they occur -- which they will," he added.

Farrar told a briefing in London that a crucial factor in preparing for disease epidemics would be the creation of a strong, independent center under the umbrella of the World Health Organization (WHO), which would lead outbreak preparedness and response.

The new center, which he said could be set up within a year if supported by the WHO and its 194 member states, should be a permanent part of the WHO system but also have "considerable operational independence and a sustainable budget".

"What we need to see now is action," Farrar said. "The WHO's leadership and its member states must make 2016 the year in which we learn the lessons of past epidemics and pandemics and implement these valuable measures, to build a more resilient global health system."


(Editing by Catherine Evans)

 

[amarilla]

So how would they spend that .72? Education, soap, masks? Article is poorly written.

A

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/pump-new-billions-disease-outbreaks-or-else

Health panel: Pump new billions into disease outbreaks—or else

By Jon Cohen
Jan. 13, 2016

A new report written by a high-profile commission urges the world to learn from the many mistakes made during the Ebola epidemic and revamp how it collectively responds to infectious disease crises.

The report by the Commission on Creating a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future (GHRF) recommends that the world spend about $4.5 billion more each year to bolster the ability of countries to respond to pandemics. “The reality is we have neglected this dimension of human security,” says commission chairman Peter Sands, who spoke at a well-attended launch of the report held this morning in New York City at the Rockefeller Foundation, one of eight sponsors.

Sands, the former CEO of the United K.ingdom’s Standard Charter Bank who is now at Harvard University, notes that the report spells out the cost of not making substantial changes to the “framework” of global health preparedness and response: The world could spend up to $60 billion per year addressing pandemics. “The scale of our risk is huge,” Sands says.

In addition to Rockefeller, the GHRF Commission was sponsored by six other philanthropies, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Ford, and the U.S. government. The release of the report comes 1 day before the World Health Organization (WHO) is expected to announce that the Ebola epidemic has formally ended.

The 26 recommendations in the report, The Neglected Dimension of Global Security, overlap a great deal with the conclusions of other recent reports, including one published by what’s known as the Harvard-LSHTM panel in The Lancet 28 November and another issued in July 2015 by an independent group of experts convened by the WHO. “Of all the reports dealing with Ebola and its consequences, this is clearly the most comprehensive, linking governance changes to financial commitments,” says Barry Bloom of Harvard, who formerly headed that university’s school of public health and did not co-author any of the reports. The new report was written by 17 commissioners from 12 countries aided by input from more than 250 experts who spoke at four public meetings organized by the U.S. National Academy of Medicine over the past year.

All three reports call for bolstering national health systems and public health infrastructure. Each group also heavily criticized WHO’s Ebola response—the GHRF report called it “sluggish, ill-coordinated, and clumsy”—and proposed substantial changes in its structure and policies, including forming a new Center for Health Emergency Preparedness and creating a $100 million contingency fund to help member states rapidly mount emergency responses. And the reports all called for strengthening and accelerating research and development of new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, as well as improved personal protective equipment for healthcare workers.

The new GHRF report is the only one that attaches dollar figures and funding sources to its recommendations. “There’s no one entity that is going to be writing a check for $4.5 billion a year,” Sands noted.

An estimated $3.4 billion of the called-for $4.5 billion would go toward upgrading public health capacities in every country, which includes adequately training a work force that can quickly detect and respond to outbreaks. Although many international projects have aimed to do just that, the report laments, they have “largely failed.” For instance, the commission noted that only 33% of WHO’s member states so far have complied with the International Health Regulations (IHR) they endorsed in 2005. “The report places the right emphasis on countries, with national engagement as the first step to strengthening public health and health security of individuals, and the collective society,” says David Heymann, a co-author of the Harvard-LSHTM report who heads the Centre on Global Health Security at Chatham House in London (which also has issued a recent report on WHO reform).

The $3.4 billion would mainly come from the countries themselves. For poorer countries, the report says the World Bank should organize additional funding with a diverse array of donors, and it suggests the United Nations secretary-general should coordinate assistance to failed and fragile states.

The report recommends that WHO’s new Center for Emergency Health Preparedness have an independent board and oversee an external assessment whether member states are meeting the IHR requirements. “The World Bank, bilateral, and other multilateral donors should declare that funding related to health system strengthening will be condi*tional upon a country’s participation in the external assessment process,” one recommendation states. By mid-2017, all countries should publish plans that show how they plan to address shortcomings within 3 years

R&D needs a boost of $1 billion per year, the report says, which Sands described as “a challenging ask.” Potential public and private sources include existing budgets for related national defense and university-led research efforts, as well as new money from businesses not typically associated with global health investments, such as the insurance industry.

WHO and the World Bank would receive the balance of the $4.5 billion, a mere $155 million a year at most. The report recommends that WHO put out a daily “watch list” of high-priority outbreaks instead of the current system of waiting for infectious diseases to spiral out of control and then declaring a “public health emergency of international concern”—which took 8 months with the Ebola epidemic. WHO also would create a Pandemic Product Development Committee, monitored by an independent board, to define priorities, streamline clinical trial designs, and help create stockpiles of vaccines.

At the launch, Bruce Aylward, the interim executive director of WHO’s new program on outbreaks and emergencies, called the report “outstanding.” He noted that the recommendations align with the thinking of WHO’s Director-General Margaret Chan. “It’s a vision she’ll lay out at the end of this month to the [WHO] executive board,” he said. Aylward contended that what really failed in WHO’s response to Ebola was that the institution was set up for one purpose and was asked to do another job. “You push a penguin off a cliff we know it doesn’t fly,” Aylward says. He also argued that it needs far more new money to address these issues than recommended in the report.

Commission chairman Sands acknowledged that it will be difficult to find $4.5 billion in new money. “But it is not out of reach,” he says. “And the alternative is frankly much more expensive.”

 

[Mixin]

We will probably help by donating our expired items, which is a large portion of our national stockpile.

When the 2009 pandemic emerged, Bush responded quickly. His office even gave stockpile updates every 2 weeks or so. This administration has let many of our preparedness items expire. They are pretty clueless as to what we actually have that is usable and where it's being stored.

We are woefully unprepared for a severe pandemic.