The exercise, conducted last week in the West Bank town of Ramallah, is one of a series being organized in the region by a U.S.-based non-profit, the Middle East Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance.

A similar exercise was conducted in Israel in February, and one will be staged in Jordan “in the next month or so,” according to consortium official Terence Taylor. Next year the consortium plans to stage a multinational exercise for all three countries whose health ministries are all members of the consortium.

Taylor said the exercises were designed to take public health and other government officials through the decision-making scenarios they would face in the early stages of an outbreak of a virulent strain of influenza -- such as might be caused by a mutation of the widespread bird flu virus known as H5N1.

The exercises are part of the consortium’s capacity-building effort among Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, said Taylor, which also includes joint laboratory training and cross-border information exchange mechanisms.

“The virus doesn’t recognize any border,” he said.

The exercises, designed by experts from the RAND Corp., a think tank founded by the U.S. Air Force, are designed to help participants “understand where they are vulnerable” and assess “whether the protocols developed for cross-border response (to an outbreak) are going to work,” said Taylor.

The consortium is one of several regional efforts to improve surveillance and response capacity to potential pandemics that are supported by the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington.

The Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance Network, which involves the health ministries of Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, staged a tabletop exercise for its six members in March.

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Shaun Waterman, UPI Homeland and National Security Editor