Health ministers and senior officials from countries and areas across the World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region today endorsed a regional action framework to strengthen health security.
While significant progress has been made to improve health security, the Western Pacific Region continues to face threats of public health emergencies from a wide range of hazards. These include emerging infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, contaminated food, extreme weather events, earthquakes, and potential chemical and radio-nuclear incidents. Smaller and less developed economies are particularly vulnerable.
The impact of public health emergencies goes far beyond health, as demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 alone, COVID-19 resulted in a decline in global GDP of more than US$ 2 trillion, or about 3.4%.
In the 20 years since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the value of investing strategically in health security has been demonstrated by the Region’s strong response to COVID-19. However, the pandemic’s widespread impact on health systems, societies and economies highlights the need for more comprehensive, integrated and forward-looking approaches to health security that go beyond the health sector.
To address this, the Region’s health leaders today endorsed the Asia Pacific Health Security Action Framework. The Framework is designed to engage health and non-health actors to support prevention, preparedness, readiness and response to multi-hazard public health emergencies, and to strengthen the resilience of health security systems at subnational, national and regional levels. The Framework guides Member States on how to plan comprehensive health security systems that encompass the core capacities of the International Health Regulations (2005), as well as multisectoral health security capacities needed to strengthen resilience to the public health threats of the future.
WHO will continue supporting Member States to build capacities, apply coordinated One Health, multi-hazard and multisectoral systems approaches to health security, and coordinate and deploy health security resources to support emergency preparedness and response in the Region.
Tomorrow, the Regional Committee will consider for endorsement a strategy on health innovation and regional action frameworks on communication for health and the health workforce in the Western Pacific.
Notes to editors:
A livestream of the Regional Committee proceedings, official documents, fact sheets and videos on the issues to be addressed this week can be accessed here. For updates, follow @WHOWPRO on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube and the hashtag #RCM74. Images are available for download via our multimedia library.
Working with 194 Member States across six regions, WHO is the United Nations specialized agency responsible for public health. Each WHO region has its regional committee – a governing body composed of ministers of health and senior officials from the region’s Member States. Each regional committee meets annually to agree on health actions and chart priorities for WHO’s work.
The WHO Western Pacific Region is home to more than 1.9 billion people across 37 countries and areas in Asia and the Pacific: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, China, Cook Islands, Fiji, France (which has responsibility for French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Wallis and Futuna), Hong Kong SAR (China), Japan, Kiribati, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Macao SAR (China), Malaysia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia (Federated States of), Mongolia, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (which has responsibility for Pitcairn Islands), the United States of America (which has responsibility for American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam), Vanuatu and Viet Nam.