Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia foster fight against infectious diseases
Addressing the event, Deputy Head of the Ministry of Health’s Department
for Preventive Medicine Department Dang Quang Tuan shared Vietnam ’s
lessons drawn from health quarantine activities along the border as
part of bilateral health quarantine agreements and international health
regulations.
Emerging infectious diseases are
changing complicatedly in the region and the world, requiring stronger
cooperation and more information sharing among countries to seek
effective response measures, he stated.
The health
care sectors of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia should foster partnership in
preventing and controlling contagious diseases, especially in activities
within the framework of a Asian Development Bank-funded project to
avoid and fight communicable diseases in the Mekong Sub-region, said
Tuan.
Participants at the event also heard reports
on disease developments as well as the supervision of the three
countries in the 2012-14 period, whole proposing ways to better control
the diseases in the future.
They pointed out that
the coordination among the three countries in the work remained poor,
causing a high number of patients infected by contagious diseases and
high fatality.
According to Ngu Duy Nghia from the
National Institute for Hygiene and Epidemiology, there are only 27
quarantine stations lying along 3,000 kilometers of borderline shared by
the three countries, making it difficult for the control of epidemics.
Bun Sreng from the Cambodia Centre for Disease
Control and Prevention proposed that the three countries set up a system
to collect health data along with intensifying health quarantines and
communications at border gates.
Pham Cong Tien, a
representative of the Central Highlands Institute for Hygiene and
Epidemiology, suggested that the health sectors of localities along the
shared border meet every six months to exchange information. In
emergency cases, they should contact daily and weekly via email or
telephone.-VNA