Dr. David Heymann, assistant director-general for communicable diseases and representative of the director general for polio eradication of the World Health Organization (WHO), presented for yesterday's Payne Lectureship series at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. CHP/PCOR director and core faculty member Alan Garber gave the opening introduction, describing Heymann as the "Indiana Jones of the medical world."

Heymann began his talk describing the history of epidemics, and the reach of infectious diseases across borders and through continents. Infectious diseases mainly originate in animals. While there are different hypotheses as to how pandemics occur, a mutation in the virus that combines the human and avian influenza virus allows this newly mutated virus to travel and infect human-to-human, with health workers usually being the first ones to be infected. Such was the case with the Spanish Flu of 1918, the Asian Flu of 1957, and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968.

Heymann also elaborated on the topic of "virus sharing" in efforts to produce influenza vaccination for possible future outbreaks and pandemics. Vaccine development often relies on strains of viruses that infect humans in developing countries. However, vaccine production is currently limited by the number of vaccine production facilities, and no developing countries have the capacity to produce influenza vaccines.

Developing countries such as Indonesia have been reluctant to share information on outbreaks within the country to the international community for the purposes of tracking emerging diseases and containing them before they have a chance to spread. The strain of the virus in the developing country's population would be used to develop a vaccine. But, there is paradoxically a great disparity in access to needed vaccines by developing countries whose strain produced the drug in the first place -- only industrialized countries can afford to purchase such drugs.

Part of WHO's goal then is to build an international community that works toward universal access of vaccines. Heymann noted that the "most important thing today is to stop the pandemic at its source."

WHO is trying to do just that; for example, they are working to come to an agreement between WHO, the vaccine industry, and individual countries in order to create an international stockpile of pandemic vaccines, in the case that a pandemic flu occurs.

While identifying, tracking, and containing infectious diseases is a continual struggle, Heymann concluded his talk with more hopeful news of new tools that are already proving to be effective, such as the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) that is able to "gather preliminary reports of public health significance in seven languages on a real-time, 24/7 basis." Such technologies and global agreements will help WHO and the international community make progress toward ensuring that both industrialized and developing countries will be properly equipped to address another outbreak.