Global Health
The path to pandemic preparedness is hidden in plain sight – opinion
May 27, 2024
When I began working on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2022, “pandemic preparedness and response” was not a part of my job scope.
I used to be hired to steer the organization’s work to strengthen health systems within the 120 countries where the Global Fund invests. (High-capacity health care contributes to eliminating HIV, tuberculosis and malaria as public health threats, ensuring higher health outcomes and the delivery of health services in a sustainable way in the long run.) Global Fund has been investing in strengthening health systems and communities for over 20 years.
At that point, “preparing for the next pandemic threat” was not related to “building a strong and resilient health care system.”
And yet it was so.
Understanding that strengthening health systems is definitely the cornerstone of stopping, preparing for, and responding to future pandemics, we combined the 2. Over the following three years, the Global Fund will invest greater than $6 billion – no other multilateral funder invests more in grants to health systems and communities than we do – to strengthen health systems and prepare for and reply to the pandemic in low- and middle-income countries.
Because strong healthcare systems in every country – not only the wealthy ones – are absolutely essential to facing the following pandemic threat.
Whatever the following pandemic is – an emerging zoonotic disease, existing epidemics like malaria emerging in recent places, antimicrobial resistance – it would not respect national borders. As we have now seen with Covid-19, we’re all in danger.
I grew up in Japan, a rustic that has proven that fighting infectious diseases does greater than just stop this particular threat. It also creates resilient health systems which can be truly universal.
In the early Nineteen Fifties, Japan launched a large, nationwide effort to combat tuberculosis – then the country’s leading reason for death – that combined the newest scientific tools, community mobilization, private sector involvement, and determined efforts to succeed in essentially the most marginalized communities. Many of the approaches now considered modern in health care systems, equivalent to grassroots experience influencing high-level policy, local case finding steering groups, and mandatory workplace testing, originated in Japan many years ago.
Not only has Japan managed to dramatically reduce tuberculosis infections and deaths, but it surely has used these efforts as a platform to create universal health care – a comprehensive health care system available to all, with a powerful public health component. The Japanese healthcare system intervenes early, monitors patients closely and, most significantly, strives to go away nobody behind. While no system is ideal, the country’s success within the fight against Covid-19 has demonstrated the facility of this approach. By committing to the fight against one disease, the health care system as a complete becomes more powerful and agile enough to face the brand new threat.
We know this approach works.
In the countries where the Global Fund invests, the identical tools have been used to fight COVID-19 that countries have developed to fight tuberculosis. For example, when a patient contracted Covid-19 in Indonesia, a healthcare employee tested him for the SARS-CoV-2 virus using equipment that was originally intended for tuberculosis testing. The test results were analyzed in a laboratory built because of investments within the fight against tuberculosis. Integrated testing – screening for multiple disease at the identical time – is becoming a central tenet of many countries’ pandemic preparedness and response plans, and can also be crucial to the widespread use of TB screening and testing. When we concentrate on the person, not the person disease, we construct true pandemic preparedness.
And because of a strong health management information system built to support TB surveillance, the country was capable of gather data to really understand the distribution of COVID-19 cases and respond accordingly with informed prevention and treatment strategies.
As global health partners gather this week on the World Health Assembly to contemplate the Agreement on Pandemics, allow us to remember one thing: in the longer term, stopping, preparing for and financing the response to pandemics have to be integrated into existing health systems and interventions disease control to maximise effectiveness, sustainability and equity.
This is the one option to construct a healthier and safer world for all.