news Experts say North American plan helped with swine flu

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Experts say North American plan helped with swine flu



Thu Apr 30, 6:40 PM




By Jennifer Ditchburn, The Canadian Press


OTTAWA - The threat was supposed to come from winged creatures rather than hooved ones, and spread via Asia, not from within North America.

Authorities thought they might have a month to deal with a global flu outbreak - maybe even three.

But despite some of the flawed assumptions that went into the North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza, experts and officials say the work that went into it has been key as the three countries struggle to deal with swine flu within their borders.

"This definitely provided the backbone that we need now," said Mary Kosinski, a policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"It really does allow us to respond in a way that is more coherent, as North America, as opposed to one country figuring it out on their own," David Butler Jones, Canada's chief public health officer, told reporters Thursday.

The plan was signed two years ago by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, former U.S. president George W. Bush and Mexico's Felipe Calderon, under the umbrella of the sometimes controversial Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP).

The document looks at how the three countries could detect, control and contain an influenza outbreak, prevent or slow its entry into North America, and then minimize the impact on the economy and society.

Little did they know that the virus would erupt within their collective borders.

The Public Health Agency of Canada refused to make officials available to speak about the plan's implementation.

Mary Mazanec, deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said it was the legwork that went into inking the plan that is helping now.

"One of the things that really this plan helped us to organize and co-ordinate is communication efforts," said Mazanec, in an interview from Washington, D.C.

"First of all, just getting parties together in advance of an event to start speaking to each other, identifying who the appropriate people are is really helpful, because then when you have an event, you have that network created. We are basically in daily communications with Canada and Mexico.

"That's critical in an event like this."

That was evident in the early stages of the outbreak, when the head of Mexico's top microbiology lab directly emailed her Canadian counterpart two weeks ago, asking for help in studying a strange new virus.

Specimens were sent to the Winnipeg lab as well as to one in the United States.

The top bureaucrat at Mexico's Department of External Affairs linked the exchange to the North American flu plan.

"This close activity that the department managed with the other countries in the context of the Security and Prosperity Partnership was able to solve and explain this problem," Julio Camarena Villasenor said in Mexico City.

There has also been some co-ordination on the public statements that officials from the three countries are making as the situation progresses, to cut down on public confusion.

Ronald St. John, a former top bureaucrat at the Public Health Agency of Canada, recalls that the North American flu plan had its beginnings post-9/11, when G-7 countries and Mexico met to discuss potential bio-terrorist threats. That was called the Global Health Security Initiative.

Eventually, Canada, Mexico and the United States decided they should discuss their own continental security, particularly in the wake of the SARS crisis in 2005.

"It was an indispensable idea," says St. John, former director of the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response.

Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles for the three countries to overcome will be resisting the temptation to close borders and the flow of goods and people, something the plan specifically aims to avoid.

Washington and Ottawa issued travel advisories against non-essential travel to Mexico, after informing officials there first. Already, tourism in Mexico is sinking with flights around the world curtailed.

St. John said he found the advisories strange because the "cat's already out of the bag" as far as the disease having travelled outside of Mexico or even North America.

"It's unfortunate because the main impact is economic."