WHO ESTABLISHES RAPID-RESPONSE UNIT TO COMBAT GROWING WORLD-WIDE THREAT OF EMERGING DISEASES
Press Release
H/2882
WHO ESTABLISHES RAPID-RESPONSE UNIT TO COMBAT GROWING WORLD-WIDE THREAT OF EMERGING DISEASES
19951018 GENEVA, 17 October (WHO) -- The World Health Organization (WHO) has established a rapid-response unit to control and prevent the growing incidence of new and re-emerging diseases around the world, with a view to improving containment of outbreaks, such as the deadly Ebola virus which struck Zaire earlier this year.The unit will be capable of mobilizing staff from both WHO headquarters in Geneva and from the agency's regional offices and placing the teams on-site within 24 hours' notification of an outbreak, together with the supplies and equipment required to implement epidemic control measures.
The new unit will be called the Division of Emerging, Viral and Bacterial Diseases Surveillance and Control (EMC). In addition to mobilizing WHO's own technical staff and expertise, EMC will also co-ordinate the activities of the agency's traditional partners, including its international network of collaborating centres, bilateral donors, expert advisers and non- governmental organizations.
In the recent outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in Zaire, for example, WHO staff from its headquarters in Geneva and its Regional Office in Brazzaville arrived at the epidemic site within 24 hours of notification in Geneva, at the same time that the diagnosis of Ebola was confirmed at the WHO Collaborating Centre on Viral Haemorrhagic Fevers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
By arriving at the epidemic site early, WHO staff and nationals from Zaire were able to set up a disease detection system and train medical students in its operation so that all cases with haemorrhagic fever could be found and isolated. The outbreak in Zaire was rapidly contained and its spread to Kinshasha, the capital city of 2 million inhabitants, was prevented.
EMC will work to strengthen country surveillance and disease control to enable countries to develop the early-warning systems necessary to detect emerging or re-emerging diseases through innovative field epidemiology and public health laboratory training programmes. The new division will also continue WHO's activities in developing a network of public health laboratories to strengthen regional and international collaboration in outbreak detection and control.
- 2 - Press Release H/2882 18 October 1995
Another major issue to be addressed by the new division is antibiotic resistance, a phenomenon which continues to emerge as one of the most important health problems of the 1990s. Infections such as malaria, tuberculosis and gonorrhoea have already become resistant to first- and second-line drugs, and development of new antibiotics to replace them lags behind. The post-war optimism in public health, when the use of newly developed antibiotics and vaccines rapidly decreased the incidence of some infectious diseases and eradicated smallpox, has been dimmed by the development of antibiotic resistance.
The new division will continue to expand WHO's network to detect and monitor antibiotic resistance worldwide, called WHONET, and WHO will use the information collected to continue to advocate research and development on new antibiotics to replace those which are no longer effective.
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