Influenza poses a major public health challenge in WHO’s South-East Asia Region (SEAR). To address the challenge posed by influenza as an infectious hazard of epidemic and pandemic potential, there is a need to generate contextual evidence for strategies focusing on risk reduction, limiting spread, minimizing impact and promoting innovations. These can inform policymakers and programme managers in their efforts of preparedness and response planning for seasonal influenza epidemics and pandemics and their impact mitigation
In this regard, the World Health Organization identified priority areas of research across five streams, namely:
Stream 1: Reducing the risk of emergence of a pandemic influenza
Stream 2: Limiting the spread of pandemic, zoonotic and seasonal epidemic influenza
Stream 3: Minimizing the impact of pandemic, zoonotic and seasonal epidemic influenza
Stream 4: Optimizing the treatment of patients
Stream 5: Promoting the development and application of new public health tools
These five streams will help in generating and synthesizing research evidence on influenza at the global level. However, generation of evidence on influenza from SEAR has been arguably low and requires careful review for alignment with regional and global priorities for evidence generation.
Accordingly, an appraisal of peer-reviewed published medical literature on Influenza, from countries in SEAR was undertaken by the Infectious Hazard Management (IHM) unit of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme (WHE) at the WHO Regional Office. Through the appraisal, a bibliometric analysis of medical literature on Influenza published over approximately the past 21 years (01 January 2000 –31 December 2021) was taken up.
The review demonstrated inconsistent research outputs across the five priority research streams and sub-streams of influenza, across SEAR Member States (MS). Also, there was a much higher scope and need for collaborative research. Notably, research that generated actionable evidence i.e., implementation and intervention related topics were less common. Similarly, research on pharmaceutical (clinical) interventions and innovations was limited with declining trends seen in the number of publications along basic science (fundamental) research.
The literature review thus provided important insights into influenza related research conducted in the region. It helped identify gaps in influenza related research evidence for identifying major areas for providing recommendations to MS and the Regional Office with a view to prioritizing avenues for future research while aligning it with global, regional, and national priorities.
Going forward, the IHM Unit plans to disseminate findings from the literature review, including through publications and further advocacy for programme and policy relevant research to address issues around influenza pandemic preparedness and response in SEAR as a whole and also in its MS. The IHM unit also proposes to make the research output database available in the public domain for analysis and application by a wider research community and for use by health policy experts.