The current coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic continues to be a stark reminder of the critical need for sufficient investment in effective preparedness for, and response to public health hazards. Ultimately, this requires resilient health systems equipped with the capacity to ultimately prevent or detect public health events — and respond appropriately in line with the global health security agenda (GHSA). Indeed, COVID-19 as well as other recent epidemics such as ebola virus disease (EVD) wholly illustrate that protecting and improving public health globally requires reinforcing public health disease surveillance systems that operate from the community level up (especially in the context of humanitarian emergencies), whilst also thinking in terms of bolstered border health security and ultimately, the impacts of population mobility and how it affects capacity for disease surveillance.
The International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) establishes a legally binding global framework to “prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.” While much progress continues to be made in strengthening local, regional and international capacity for addressing emerging infectious disease threats; the pandemic, and the emergence of epidemic prone diseases/re-emergence of diseases we continue to see, is a stark reminder of the many threats and vulnerabilities the world continues — and will continue to face in this regard. Globally, some notable ongoing vulnerabilities include geographic areas with weak disease surveillance systems and inadequate diagnostic capacities, lack of institutional coordination, existing barriers to access to essential health services, limited mechanisms for disseminating outbreak information, and inadequate public health security measures at borders and points of entry. These vulnerabilities (among others) illustrate the critical need to improve prevention, detection and response efforts for infectious disease outbreaks, and other public health threats and hazards with a focus on mobility. In this regard, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), has extensive experience in advancing the GHSA and supporting the implementation of the IHR.
IOM thus proposes a collaborative strategic and technical partnership between CDC, IOM, respective government national counterparts, academic and local partners, communities and other key stakeholders which will be structured as discrete projects that are all oriented at achieving elements of the NOFO’s strategic objectives, and are individually tailored for country context and needs at local levels to overall facilitate the expansion of efforts and strategies to strengthen public health surveillance systems and preparedness globally. Through this project, IOM will build on its previous experience in public health emergency preparedness and response to support selected countries through this funding opportunity to enhance their capacities to prevent, detect, respond, and control infectious disease, strengthen border health security, and ultimately mitigate public health events of international concern (PHEICs) or other global health threats that emerge, and in partnership with CDC — save lives.
The response will be structured under two overall thematic areas, namely: overarching core public health surveillance capacity building (for component 1 and 4) and rapid response to small-scale and large-scale infectious disease outbreaks or other public health emergencies and emerging infectious disease threats (for components 2,3 and 5), where IOM is best placed and capacitated to facilitate robust and evidence-based interventions and mobilize its multisectoral capacity and expertise in the domains of population mobility and global health. IOM’s approach to