# 4677
Last week the UK’s Health Protection Agency convened a two-day conference in London where scientists, academics and clinicians gathered to examine lessons learned from the pandemic of 2009.
You can view the program for the conference, along with bios of the presenters, here.
From the Emerging Health Threats Forum we get the following report, with extensive comments and reactions from Angus Nicoll of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
Friday 25 June 2010
ECDC expert evaluates flu response, identifies weaknesses that need to be tackled for next time
From a European perspective “it’s hard to think of a better pandemic”, says Angus Nicoll of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Many features of the 2009 pandemic were in Europe’s favour, he says, but adds there are still lessons to be learned about the public health responses countries planned and how well they worked.
Speaking at a UK Health Protection Agency conference about the public health response this week, Nicoll says that on balance, Europe managed the pandemic “moderately” well, but that countries were “lucky it was the pandemic it was.”
He described the advantages Europe had in tackling the pandemic — that the pandemic virus emerged in Central America from pigs, and was not a variant of the deadly Asian bird flu virus that many had feared, he explained.
