As a part of the ASSET project, the European Institute of Women’s Health were tasked with liaising with local schools to disseminate the activities of the ASSET project. The schools were to have received funding under the Erasmus Plus programme, which is the programme that combines all the EU’s current schemes for education, training, youth and sport in Europe.
In 2009 A(H1N1) pandemic, vaccines were ready and could be supplied only when the peak of the pandemic was already decreasing in most European countries, discouraging people from getting vaccinated. Since the disease was not as severe as it was feared in the beginning, the consequences of this delay were not that serious, even if some lives could have been saved if the vaccines were available in advance. Ebola vaccine also arrived to West Africa when the epidemic was over, while a zika vaccine is still very far away. According to Thomas Breuer, however, GSK Chief Medical Officer, in case of another flu pandemic, a better cooperation among stakeholders and new technologies could accelerate the production and supply of new vaccines.
Albert Osterhaus, director of the Research Center for Emerging Infections and Zoonoses (RIZ) in Hannover, Germany, and Chairman of the European Working group on Influenza (ESW), is one of the top virologist in the world, who has discovered more than 50 new viruses over the last decades. In this short video he explains why the word “pandemic” can be a cause of misunderstanding between health authorities and the public, as it happened in 2009, when the new emerging flu virus A(H1N1) turned out to be milder than expected in the beginning.
Declaring an emergency is a dirty work, but someone has to do it. When facing a serious threat to global public health, even if complete evidence is lacking, someone has to take the responsibility to push the red button that activates a chain of coordinated actions (such as cooperation among states and research on vaccines). Choosing to do this, the risk of giving a false alarm is unavoidable.
During the 2009 A(H1N1) pandemic, the issue of how many deaths were associated to the emerging virus was one of the main causes of misunderstanding between authorities and the general public, which ended in a worrying lack of trust. The pandemic, initially presented as a potential serious threat, in the end was no more severe than a common seasonal flu. Unfortunately, even nowadays, it is difficult to ascertain if and how much H1N1 pandemic was different from any other seasonal flu, based on official data.
Members of the ECOM project will gather for a final symposium on November 10th 2015 in Stockholm, prior to the European Scientific Conference on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology (ESCAIDE). ECOM – which stands for Effective Communication in Outbreak Management – is an EU funded project that aims to develop strategies for improving risk-communication during major pandemic outbreaks in Europe.
Final Report from the Expert Group on "Science, H1N1 and Society" . 2011 June 15. Science, H1N1 and society: Towards a more pandemic-resilient society.
Mandeville KL, O'Neill S, Brighouse A, Walker A, Yarrow K, Chan K. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2014 Mar;68(3):197-203.
Background: Concerns have been raised over competing interests (CoI) among academics during the 2009 to 2010 A/H1N1 pandemic. Media reporting can influence public anxiety and demand for pharmaceutical products. We assessed CoI of academics providing media commentary during the early stages of the pandemic.
