WASHINGTON, March 15 (UPI) -- Officials from six Southeast Asian nations, with U.S. assistance, practiced responses to a flu pandemic in the region's first table-top emergency exercise.
Officials from the ministries of health, foreign affairs, agriculture, tourism and security in the six nations -- Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand - joined representatives from the United Nations and regional institutions in the two-day exercise, according to a statement from the Washington non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative, or NTI.
The exercise was designed and run by the participants, working with health specialists from the RAND Corporation, a U.S. military think tank.
NTI said the game was the region's "first-ever simulation exercise designed to test responses to a pandemic influenza emergency."
"Using techniques similar to those in modern war-gaming, the tabletop exercise was designed to foster cooperation among countries in the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance Network, the region seen as the most likely source of a potentially devastating flu pandemic such as avian flu.
NTI said the exercise had identified "gaps and weaknesses in systems for detecting, monitoring, tracking and containing" pandemic influenza.
The event was sponsored by NTI, with additional funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Rockefeller Foundation.
"A disease outbreak on one continent can be on another in a day. In a global economy, national borders are no defense against the spread of disease," said former Senator Sam Nunn, NTI's co-chairman.
"Finding gaps now in disease monitoring and control systems through this exercise will help us save lives in a real crisis."
