Mekong Collaboration Program

InSTEDD's Mekong Collaboration Program (MCP), launched in December 2007, will help nations in Southeast Asia predict, prevent and respond to emerging and resurgent infectious diseases. Countries we’ll work with include Cambodia, Lao, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Yunan Province of China.

InSTEDD will develop a platform for collaboration within those nations that will help with both reporting from the village level and analysis at the national level. Our aim is to improve the speed of outbreak recognition, decision-making, and action against diseases and disasters, with a particular effort at international collaboration across sectors and across boundaries. We intend to include an ability to share outbreak information more easily than most national Ministries of Health can now, and so support them in meeting their goals for the new International Health Regulations implemented in June of 2007.
 
Although Southeast Asia is a complex environment, with exceptional regional diversity in language, culture, geography, economic systems, political structures, environmental threats and infectious diseases, we think that an effective platform developed under such challenges could also serve as a model for other areas of the world.
 
We have looked around and seen that there are other likely areas on the planet where such an effort might be helpful, but we’ve now spent time in Asia and found several reasons why we want to start there:
 
  1. There are countries along the Mekong where little progress has been made in public health process and structure. The opportunity to shape reporting methods based on the new Health Regulations seems valuable and might be very useful for them. New techniques can be designed in concert with local and regional policies designed to meet those international standards, and that’s an unusual opportunity.
  2. Six Ministries of Health in the region have already agreed to collaborate on the reporting of outbreaks across their borders but have not yet designed a method for that collaboration. If InSTEDD introduces simple, robust, open-source, and free tools that provide effective methods for collaboration, we may reduce existing barriers to information flow and help them meet their goal. That is particularly important in a region where past outbreaks have sensitized governments to the need for rapid cooperation and urgent containment.
  3. This region has an exceptionally large number of emerging and resurgent diseases that worry everyone in this era of global trade and travel. It’s a place where shortcomings in disease monitoring, analysis, decision support, and response have global implications.
  4. Southeast Asia is dominantly rural, with livestock kept  in very close proximity to both wildlife and humans. The animal diseases are economically important and, in some cases, also pose a zoonotic infection risk to humans. Designing systems here  that monitor animal outbreaks as well as human infections is a clear necessity and an exceptional challenge.
  5. Because some countries are still developing public health infrastructure, we can select or develop tools and services that are designed from the ground up  to serve public health and humanitarian response needs in the area.
  6. We can match the extreme requirements of rural Southeast Asia to cutting-edge technology and top talent and use “agile” processes to rapidly iterate the development process based on immediate feedback from our users in the field. It’s a crucible where we’re able to “fail fast,” then try again right away.
  7. We’ve found excellent partners for our efforts already working in the Mekong region. They are capitalizing on the energy and optimism of the local communities and the constructive engagement of the national Ministries, and we find that desirable too.

 

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