The WHO issued the Global Influenza Strategy in 2019 (https://apps.who.int/iris/

The WHO issued the Global Influenza Strategy in 2019 (https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/311184). In this discussion form, offer your thoughts on the document. What do you like about it? Are there any areas that you feel should be included that are not? Do you think it will be successful? What are some factors that could impact its success? Make a primary post of at least 500 words and reply to at least 2 of your classmates’ posts.
Please Respond to these two posts. Post 1
The World Health Organization released its Global Influenza Strategy for 2019-2030 in 2019 with the intention to prevent, control, and prepare. The document outlines four strategic objectives to achieve these goals. These objectives are to promote research and innovation to address unmet public health needs, strengthen global influenza surveillance, monitoring, and data utilization, expand seasonal influenza prevention and control policies and programs to protect the vulnerable, and lastly to strengthen pandemic preparedness and response for influenza to make the world safer. After outlining, in detail, each of these objectives and what they mean, the document goes on to provide detail on the implementation of the strategy that will help achieve these objectives.
I think that this is a very well-written and informative document. The document outlining the strategy begins with a comprehensive introduction to influenza. This includes the history of influenza, the major challenges it has posed, progress made in public health over the years to combat it, and current gaps that are remaining. I think that having this section included in the document is extremely important. In doing so, they are not only setting the stage to introduce their global strategy but also ensuring that the document is more user-friendly and can be well received by a wide audience, even if they do not initially have an extensive understanding of influenza or it’s history.
Going deeper into the sections covering each individual strategic objective, I think that all the information is presented and divided up into well-organized and visually pleasing sections. Each objective covers specific actions, the role that the World Health Organization plays in the objective, and how the objective aligns with the World Health Organization’s assets and strategies. I think that this layout once again makes the document very user-friendly, and the structure makes each objective and step to achieve it easy to understand. I also think that the description of the implementation of the strategy to achieve these strategies is laid out in a way that presents a lot of information very clearly and concisely that may otherwise be very dense and difficult to understand.
The annexes placed at the end of the document provide lots of good information that support all the claims and strategies proposed in the global influenza strategy to prevent, control, and prepare the public for any influenza outbreak. Something that I think could be a beneficial addition to this section is recommendations for individuals. Although this does a very good job of detailing all of the efforts and strategies that will be implemented by the larger organizations in an effort to increase public health preparedness, I think that more information could have been provided about personal efforts to be taken. Although I know that this is not the target audience for this document, I think that including some efforts and resources that the individual can explore would help to increase the effectiveness of the strategies presented and will make the public better prepared to prevent and control the influenza virus.
Post 2
The WHO Global Influenza Strategy 2019-2030 focuses on the plans for prevention, control, and preparation of Influenza in the coming decade. The goals include reducing the severity of influenza, controlling the risk of influenza and minimizing the possibility of an influenza pandemic. The plan includes 2 high level goals for 2030 and 4 strategic goals that will support the vision and outline forward progression.
The first strategic objective is, in my opinion, the most important part. Influenza is constantly evolving and so is our need to keep up with that evolution. Continued and even more dedicated research into influenza should be a main priority. I completely agree that more effective antiviral drugs and stronger vaccines are necessary to gain public trust in countries that traditional look at these things adversely. This objective focuses on creating better medicine; something the world will always need.
By strengthen the monitoring systems around influenza there will be better data available to make crucial decisions. The goal of the second objective is to understand the burden and impact of influenza. This may be the hardest goal to meet. Accurate monitoring of global sicknesses is traditionally difficult. Unfortunately, there isn’t much detail on the actual monitoring plans. There are multiple listings on who will take part in this monitoring, but I can’t decipher how this will be systematically observed.
The third objective is an evolution of what we have seen for years in the form of a seasonal vaccine. The goal is to further expand preparedness around seasonal influenza. The main development is further targeting of groups globally that will be most affected by seasonal influenza. It seems that this objective is taking advantage of the developments from objective two. By collecting precise data more resources can be put into protecting vulnerable groups thus slowing the spread of seasonal influenza. I think this is a great plan. I remember when I was a kid everyone was told to get a flu vaccine. I still think everyone should get a flu vaccine, but I do believe more effort should be put into targeting populations globally that will be severely affected.
“The world is ill-prepared to respond to a severe influenza pandemic or to any similarly global, sustained and threatening public health emergency.” – Dr Harvey V. Fineberg, Chair. This guy really nailed it didn’t he? If only he knew what was going to happen in a few months. I think everyone is on board with objective four. There is and has been an obvious need for pandemic planning. Whether is be Influenza or COVID the fact that a “simple” sickness can change the world is not something that should be a reality in 2022. But in the fashion of the world being ravaged by COVID it was almost comical that this was the shortest objective, about a half page. This objective made is abundantly clear why we are where we are.
Overall, this plan was well thought out but eerily basic. I know people that put more detail in a DnD campaign. How many times can you use “promote, provide, and support” in one paper? There are no details on how any of this will be carried out. I’m assuming there’s piles of associated documents because this provides no actual plan. The report was just a list of talking points. It all sounds great but if you were to hand this to someone and told them to execute on it they wouldn’t get far at all. It was a good read to hand out to the public so they feel safe and secure, but this can’t actually be the plan.