Universities in Sweden want to contribute more to preparing for and dealing with the next pandemic. The ‘spider in the web’ is a centre at the medical university Karolinska Institutet, KI, which has established a network of expertise throughout the country.
Sweden’s early response to the COVID-19 pandemic was slow, contributing to thousands more deaths than in other Nordic countries. Faster and more intrusive action was needed, especially in February and March 2020, concluded the Coronavirus Commission, set up to oversee the Social Democratic government’s handling of the infectious disease crisis.
Another key finding was that the government delegated too much responsibility to its Public Health Agency, whose expert assessments and recommendations were formally the responsibility of only one person, its director general.
Early next year, a new government inquiry will present a draft of a Swedish strategy to better deal with dangerous infectious diseases and the next pandemics.
“We will develop a new legal framework to improve Sweden’s current infection control legislation, but we will also develop a basis for a national strategy to deal with pandemics,” Ann-Christin Johnreden, the inquiry’s lead investigator, told Euractiv.
Health crisis network
Johnreden and the other investigators were recently invited to the Karolinska Institutet’s Centre for Health Crises. The centre was founded in 2021 by KI’s former President, Ole Petter Ottersen, who wanted the university’s research resources and expertise to be used by policymakers struggling with the pandemic.
“We tried to understand what KI could do differently in a future pandemic, and one key lesson was that we needed to establish contacts with government agencies ahead of future crises to understand where we could contribute – it is too late when the crisis is already happening,” said Anna Zorzet, Strategic Process Leader at the centre.
To fill the knowledge gap, she wants Swedish universities to play a more important role in planning, preparing for and dealing with future pandemics or serious health threats.
The centre has established a network of 33 external contacts at 15 other universities in Sweden and also engaged ten expert coordinators at KI in areas such as outbreak preparedness and control, laboratory and diagnostic surge capacity, intensive care, and emergency surgery.
“We are working proactively to spread knowledge about what we do and what we can do to help in a crisis,” Zorzet remarked. The centre’s mission is to build the next generation of health crisis experts through research, training and interdisciplinary collaboration and to help authorities make more informed decisions.
According to Anna Zorzet, there is no shortage of tasks that universities can perform before and during a health threat.
“We hope to facilitate more cross-disciplinary research, develop relevant health crises courses, analyse how the health care system can build surge capacity, and build stronger relationships with partners outside academia,” she said.
Clinical trials lessons learned
Zorzet’s KI colleague, Helena Hervius Askling (MD), is the centre’s Expert Coordinator for Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Preparedness.
Last year, she organised an open seminar to highlight why Sweden was not at the forefront of conducting large clinical treatment trials of antivirals and anti-inflammatory drugs during the pandemic.
“Now we know that we did not have the structures in place to have our own or take significant part in other countries’ frontline clinical trials at the time. So, patients in Sweden weren’t able to have access to the first drugs that showed good effect on COVID-19,” Hervius Askling told Euractiv.
Lessons being drawn, doctors and scientists are now focusing on having an infection trial network up and running, which could also be used in future pandemics. The aim of the recently founded network, Action Sweden, is to facilitate access to larger European clinical treatment trials in peaceful times as well as in crises.
Which formal role universities and institutions for higher education in Sweden will be given by policymakers in the new Swedish pandemic strategy is still unclear, as the government’s inquiry will not be presented until late February 2025.
Next threats
At the beginning of October, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, ECDC, listed ten communicable disease threats to Europe in its weekly bulletin.
These range from Measles, Bird flu and Marburg virus to locally acquired Dengue and variants of Mpox to the West Nile virus infections.
Even if there is no lack of threats of new outbreaks, Jonathan Suk, senior public health emergency expert at the ECDC, told Euractiv that the ECDC has to work constantly to ensure that attention is not lost on health crises in EU member states. There are many other societal crises that need to be dealt with, many of which, in the end, also could have important health dimensions.
“Our general advice is to base preparedness and pandemic strategies upon lessons from the past, to test new plans regularly, and for pandemics, to be prepared to implement public health and social measures or non-pharmaceutical interventions for scenarios in which drugs or vaccines are not yet available,” he said.
[Edited by Vasiliki Angouridi, Brian Maguire]
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Publish date : 2024-10-22 13:29:00
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The post Swedish universities want bigger say in pandemic planning – Euractiv first appeared on Love Europe.
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Publish date : 2024-10-22 20:54:04
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