Since the highly path­o­genic avian influenza strain H5N1 re-emerged in South­east Asia in 2003, EINet has been keep­ing a close eye on the sit­u­a­tion. This emerg­ing zoonotic dis­ease has had a dev­as­tat­ing impact on ani­mal health and the econ­omy in the affected areas. More­over, avian influenza H5N1 has been increas­ingly threat­en­ing human health, caus­ing con­cern that it may become the next pan­demic influenza, with poten­tially dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences. In order to enhance the level of bio­pre­pared­ness against this emerg­ing threat in the Asia Pacific, EINet has responded actively in the fol­low­ing manner:

• Ini­ti­ated the dis­sem­i­na­tion of biweekly “APEC EINet Alerts” on avian influenza updates to sup­ple­ment the exist­ing biweekly news­briefs. Thus, our read­ers now obtain timely, reli­able, and sum­ma­rized avian influenza-related news on a weekly basis. View lat­est news…
• Within each EINet Alert and News­brief, we have added the sec­tions “Global: Cumu­la­tive num­ber of human cases of avian influenza A/(H5N1)” and “Avian/Pandemic influenza updates”. The for­mer pro­vides quick access to the lat­est num­ber of human cases and deaths due to avian influenza H5N1 since 2003, and the lat­ter pro­vides links to high qual­ity web­sites on avian/pandemic influenza subjects.
• Hosted the first APEC Vir­tual Sym­po­sium on Pan­demic Pre­pared­ness and Response on Jan­u­ary 19, 2006. This Access Grid video­con­fer­ence was a major suc­cess with par­tic­i­pa­tion by 10 APEC mem­ber economies. Each econ­omy pre­sented their epi­demi­o­logic sit­u­a­tion and pan­demic plan­ning sta­tus in this col­lab­o­ra­tive, real-time event.