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The following is a summary of “Epidemic preparedness and response capacity against infectious disease outbreaks in 186 countries, 2018–2022,” published in the November 2024 issue of Infectious Disease by Eze et al.
Researchers conducted a retrospective study to examine the epidemic preparedness and response capacities of health systems in 186 countries from 2018 to 2022.
They used data from the International Health Regulations (IHR) State Party Self-Assessment Annual Reporting (SPAR) submissions to evaluate health systems’ IHR capacities in 5 areas: prevention, detection, response resource enablement and coordination, and operational readiness from 2018 to 2022. The IHR capacities were categorized into 5 levels, with level 1 representing the lowest capacity and level 5 the highest and calculated each index’s capacity level by averaging its related indicators analyzing the trends over time by the Mann–Kendall nonparametric test.
The results showed that SPAR reporting slightly increased from 92.9% (182 of 196 countries) in 2018 to 94.9% (186 of 196 countries) in 2022, with notable improvements across all 5 capacity domains: prevention (58.4 in 2018 to 66.5 in 2022), detection (74.7 to 78.3), response (56.5 to 67.8), enabling resources and coordination (63.0 to 68.3), and operational readiness (62.8 to 69.9). In 2022, 116 (62%) countries reported functional prevention capacity (Level 4 or 5), 162 (87%) had functional detection capacity, 118 (63%) had functional response capacity, 121 (65%) had functional enabling resources and coordination, and 133 (72%) had functional operational readiness.
Investigators concluded that there was a global increase in functional capacity across all 5 domains by 2022, lacking a complete functional competence, highlighting the urgent need to strengthen IHR competencies for global health security.
Source: bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-024-10168-8
