[Hildebrando]

ATLANTIC STORM, EL INTERNACIONAL SIMULACRO DE PANDEMIA DEL 2005

"Dark Winter" (2001) no fue el único "ejercicio" de pandemia, que preparó la actual crisis. Luego tuvimos la "Atlantic Storm". La Biblioteca Nacional de Medicina de los Estados Unidos, junto con el Instituto Nacional de Salud, publicaron lo siguiente respecto a este simulacro:



On 14 January 2005, ten heads of government from Europe and North America and the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO; Geneva, Switzerland) were scheduled to meet for a ‘Transatlantic Security Summit' in Washington, DC, USA, to discuss the threat of international terrorism. On the eve of the meeting, news broke that citizens from several European countries appeared to have become ill with smallpox; shortly thereafter suspected smallpox cases appeared in the USA. Although the assembled leaders did not know it at the time, a radical terrorist group had obtained seed strains of Variola major—the virus causing smallpox—and deliberately released the virus in a number of main transport hubs and sites of commerce throughout Europe and North America. On 14 January, the heads of states who gathered in Washington were confronted with one of the worst nightmares imaginable: the use of contagious and deadly disease as a weapon.

Luckily, the real world has been spared such an attack—this scenario was a simulated exercise with the aim of assessing how the international community would react to such a rapidly evolving public health emergency. The Atlantic Storm exercise was designed to provoke imagination and to prompt action by making the reality of a deliberately caused epidemic more vivid (Smith et al, 2005). The exercise underscores our shared responsibility to prevent, prepare for and respond to such a threat at an international level, as the lessons learned from it are relevant to all large-scale, destabilizing epidemics of infectious disease—be they natural or intentional. Atlantic Storm vividly illustrates that preparedness matters: heads of state cannot be expected to create the necessary emergency response systems in the midst of an international health and security crisis. Instead, medical, public health, security, diplomatic and emergency response systems must be adapted for this new threat, and critical resources—such as medicines and vaccines—must be produced and stockpiled to prepare for a biological attack or for an emerging pandemic.

Atlantic Storm was a ministerial-level exercise simulating a series of bioterrorist attacks on the transatlantic community (Figs 1,,2).2). The exercise was designed, organized and convened by a team from the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (PA, USA), the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University (Washington, DC, USA), and the Transatlantic Biosecurity Network, a group of medical, public health and security experts from Europe and North America. We challenged the summit principals, all of whom were current or former senior government officials (Table 1), to address important strategic issues, such as attaining situational awareness in the wake of a terrorist attack, coping with limited medical resources, deciding how to manage the movement of people across borders, and communicating with their citizens. The main lesson learned from the exercise—the need to reinforce international health security—is especially timely now, given the rapid spread of Asian bird flu to Western Europe and the looming threat of a global influenza pandemic.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article...isterial,2).

Aunque este ejercicio sigue centrado en un brote de viruela, al final se hace un paralelo con el rápida propagación de la gripe aviar desde Asia a Europa Occidental... Ya no se reúnen solo autoridades de los Estados Unidos, sino de países europeos también, con presencia de la OMS. En el simulacro, hay que decidir cómo controlar los movimientos de las personas por las fronteras y la prensa es la que informa la alarmante noticia de la propagación de la enfermedad en estaciones de transporte y lugares comerciales. El ejercicio arroja como resultado la conclusión de lo mal preparados que están los estados para hacer frente a una pandemia, por lo que es necesaria una respuesta a nivel internacional. Tal como en el simulacro de 2001, la Johns Hopkins University, está involucrada en su realización...