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2. Pandemic Influenza Contingency (PIC), UNSIC
PIC is the part of UNSIC focused on contingency planning for a high-mortality influenza pandemic – non-health aspects.
In addition to the UN’s own preparedness, we focus on two areas that I want to talk about today:
National readiness for a pandemic
Humanitarian readiness for a pandemic, where my colleague Peter Scott-Bowden of WFP will take over.

3. 1) National readiness Best Practice
Substantive planning for:
1) pandemic containment and
2) responding to the pandemic crisis: 
What we need is a worldwide movement for all Governments to engage in substantive planning for:
1) pandemic containment and
2) responding to the pandemic crisis:
Of course my work is mainly focused on 2), the non-health aspects of Pandemic Readiness.

4. National readiness main elements
Organization & planning
Coordination
Operational continuity of infrastructure
Communications
On national preparedness it is our analysis that governments have four main areas of primary concern.
Operational continuity of infrastructure is emerging as the weakest of the four.
Almost all countries have made health sector preparations & a communications strategy, but relatively few countries have so far taken a truly multi-sector approach.
It will be a couple more months before we have truly comprehensive global data. In the meantime we have done some small surveys …

5. Imagine a water cutoff in a megacity …
Coverage of contingency planning for essential services in 15 National Pandemic Preparedness Plans in Asia Pacific
Here is a survey of 15 countries in Asia / Pacific by sector covered in preparedness work:
At the top you see 11 out of 15 countries have made plans for burial/mortuary services.
However at the bottom -- only 1 country has made plans for finance – and yet this could be just as important. Little will function if money stops flowing.
And alarmingly few countries have developed plans for water or food sectors.
Imagine a water cutoff in a megacity …
This is concern also to the IMF (maybe I will have met Charlie Blitzer).
Total economies = 15 (UNSIC/PIC May 2007)

6. Indicators Of Pandemic Readiness For 7 Selected Countries
No Of Countries with a YES
This slide shows the average sector coverage for a group of 7 countries, mainly in Africa.
Again, burial is covered by a similar 70% -- but finance only by 30%.
So even though African readiness is far behind Asian readiness, the overall pattern is similar.

7. Indicators Of Pandemic Readiness For 6 Selected Countries
% of Indicators Positive on Basis of Available Paper Plan
This slide is of 6 countries in different regions.
It shows the percentage of some PIC national readiness indicators that were rately positively for each country. This are in the same 4 categories I mentioned earlier.
The point here is that there is considerable variance in the ‘reported readiness’ of different countries even in the same region.

8. 10 areas for attention - Rule of law - Financial sector
- Public utilities - Communications
Local level - Citizens engaged
The vulnerable - Who does what?
Public, private, civil, media partnership
Lower capacity countries
This is key readiness priorities. You can read them for yourselves.
But look at the implication of just a couple:
- Governments need plan to maintain rule of law despite high absenteeism
- Governments need to plan to communicate clearly and openly about the threat and response.
Planning needs to be disseminated to and replicated at local level – a massive task.
Plans need to be specific about who will do what when how.
The scale is enormous.

9. A strategy for improvement
- measure progress in national influenza pandemic preparedness, - advocate the need for improvement, help -- develop and deploy tools that help partners improve preparedness.
I believe measurement will be key.
The London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene is undertaking some comprehensive analytical work region by region of prevention and readiness measures.
UNSIC-PIC is setting up a global ‘Readiness Tracker’.
It will show UN readiness and national readiness through a system of simple indicators.
The idea is to assist coordination with fairly basic comparisons made easily available.

10. Integrating this new risk into the work of existing structures
Over the last decade in particular, much progress has been made in many countries in building a national disaster risk reduction capacity.
Non-health aspects of a pandemic resemble those for any large-scale catastrophe, such as an earthquake, but are uniquely global and very multi-sectoral. They are also not just large scale but ‘huge scale’. It is vital to integrate this new risk into the work of existing structures.
Donor representatives could assist by advocating the addition of the risk of a ‘sudden new high-mortality pandemic’ -- alongside earthquakes, floods and tsunamis.

11. 1) National readiness 2) Humanitarian readiness
Existing humanitarian operations
New vulnerable groups
... worst in lowest capacity countries
A high-mortality influenza pandemic would:
a) present special challenges to existing humanitarian operations around the world, &
b) create new vulnerable groups. Imagine the price of food skyrocketing out of reach in some countries.
I think this is a very important area, but I am going to hand over to my good colleage – Peter Scott Bowden – of WFP.

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