As Australia continues to battle through the Covid pandemic, the nation’s peak science research organisation consulted with 146 experts from 66 organisations to outline 20 steps we need to take now to contain the next pandemic. The CSIRO report Strengthening Australia’s Pandemic Preparedness, released on Tuesday, outlines how we can speed up the development of new vaccines, tests and treatments to more efficiently fight the next pandemic.The five key virus families listed above are those we should research in greater depth in case one of them becomes the source of the next pandemic.The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations wants to be able to develop a vaccine to combat the next pandemic virus within 100 days.It took a year to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, previously it took ten years to develop a new vaccine.To be able to fast track vaccines to the next pandemic we need to build facilities to mass produce different types vaccines in Australia, the report said.Currently we have the ability to manufacture inactivated viruses and live, attenuated viruses at the CSL factory and from 2024 we will have the ability to make mRNA vaccines at a Moderna plant being built in Melbourne.However, the report says we should also try to build facilities capable of making recombinant proteins and viral vector vaccines and this may require significant government investment.To be ready to treat the next pandemic Australia needs to gather more evidence on repurposing existing treatments for use against new viruses. A national database overseen by a central body (possibly a new Centre for Disease Control) should bring together evidence on the therapeutic targets in different viruses and any research on which existing treatments might work.We need to train more people to work on quickly isolating the genetics of new pandemic viruses and find ways to share data to speed up response to an emerging pandemic virus, the report said.We also need to establish a national genomic analysis authority to co-ordinate data sharing between the states.As we saw with Omicron, a mass outbreak of a new variant can quickly overwhelm our pathology labs so we need to develop new point of care tests that can be done in GP clinics or the home but we need to make sure these tests are accurate, the report said.Australia’s health system must develop uniform data standards. Currently each state jurisdiction collects and presents health data differently making it almost impossible to exchange data, the report said.We also need to find ways to make available non-health data for decision making during a pandemic such as geo-referenced socio-economic, intervention compliance, movement, and environmental data to forecast the spread of an infection.On average, two novel viruses are appearing in humans each year, and the proportion that give rise to larger outbreaks is growing. They have caused more than 45 million deaths since 1981.CSIRO Chief Executive Dr Larry Marshall said preparing and protecting the nation from pandemics would take a Team Australia approach.“Australia played a critical role in the global response to Covid-19 to contain outbreaks and find a vaccine, including detection, safety, data tracking, vaccine manufacture and testing, virus analysis, and predictive data analytics,” Dr Marshall said.suetips
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