From plague to MERS: coordinating Australia’s response to emerging infectious diseases

Jenny Firman; Stephanie Williams; Chris Baggoley

doi:10.1071/phrp2651654

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

Previous Next Contents Vol 26(5)

From plague to MERS: coordinating Australia’s response to emerging infectious diseases

Jenny Firman ^A ^* , Stephanie Williams ^A and Chris Baggoley ^A

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A Office of Health Protection, Australian Government Department of Health, Canberra, ACT

^* Correspondence to: jenny.firman@health.gov.au

Public Health Research and Practice 26, e2651654 https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp2651654

Published: 14 December 2016

2016 © Firman et al. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, which allows others to redistribute, adapt and share this work non-commercially provided they attribute the work and any adapted version of it is distributed under the same Creative Commons licence terms.

Abstract

Rapid international travel times and the arrival of new and unexpected infectious disease threats have demonstrated that, for effective communicable disease control, Australia’s response needs to be flexible and coordinated. This paper summarises how our public health and clinical systems would respond to a case of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus and our responsibility under the International Health Regulations to notify the World Health Organization (WHO). It also describes the processes undertaken by WHO when it declares that a disease outbreak is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Australia has robust communicable disease response systems, tested by new threats for many years, which are under constant review and improvement.