It took more than a month for the China authorities to inform about the death of two men infected by the bird flu lesser-known strain H7N9 prompting questions about the notification system, in the light of the lack of information which left Hong Kong unprepared for the SARS epidemic 10 years ago.

Furthermore, questions were raised about a possible link between the 16,000 thousand carcasses of pigs dumped in March in the Huangpu river, which provides drinking water to residents in Shanghai.

For media concerns on China communication:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22011366

The authorities announced on Sunday 31 April the death of two men, 87 and 27-year-old, and the case of a 35-year-old woman critically ill in Anhui.

The 87-year-old man became ill on 19 February and died on 27 February, the 27-year-old one became ill on 27 February and died on 4 March and the 35-year-old woman became ill on 9 March and is still fighting for her life. The Jiangsu’s Health Department announced on 2 April that four new cases developed symptoms between 19 and 21 March.

The authorities provided very few details about the death cases on the day of the announcement, but sought to calm fears about the virus, insisting that there was no evidence that he virus could be easily transmitted between human.

Interviewed by Reuters’ news agency, United Nations World Health Organisation (WHO) representative in China Michael O’Neil said that the government acted properly as the deaths needed to be investigated.

“China actually for a long time has been reporting promptly and openly. I think SARS was a turning point globally for this sort of thing”, said O’Neil to Reuters, referring to the 2003 epidemic where Chinese officials were reported not to have reacted quickly enough to prevent the spread of the epidemic. SARS emerged in China and infected 8,000 people worldwide.

O’Neil confirmed that the China National Health and Family Planning Commission notified WHO on Sunday 31 March after the Chinese agency received confirmation of the cases by the laboratory of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention on 29 March.

For full story:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/01/us-china-birdflu-idUSBRE93008X20130401

Further more, according to China official news agency, Xinhua, no bird flu was found in the dead pigs samples dumped in the Huangpu River in Shanghai. The news agency reported that the Shanghai city government issued a statement saying that Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center tested 34 samples of pig carcasses pulled from the river on 1 April and found no bird flu.

But according to WHO and reported in the South China Morning Post, it is too early to rule out a link, even if tests have not found it.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control has a Questions and Answers section on H7N9 on his website.
www.chinacdc.cn/en/

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Department of Health closely monitors the situation and recommends proper sanitary measures to be taken on its website http://www.dh.gov.hk/english/press/2013/130401.html

www.wpro.who.int/china/en/

What makes this course on “Behavioral and Social Communication for Outbreak Response” different from other training workshops?

There are, indeed, already many courses. In fact, since 2003, when SARS and bird  a problem, organisations all over the world have been developing training programmes, but these typically tend to be one, two days workshops. There is a limit to how much you can learn during a typical training workshop and these are fairly difficult things to learn.

So, we are creating a course of three to four months duration, because we thing that it takes that long for people to understand and to be able to apply the concepts that we will be teaching.

It is also a course developed at  the University of Hong Kong, one of the world’s leading universities. Experts in education are involved. We use the same techniques that we would use in a university course to help people learn, reflect and implement the knowledge they receive.

This is very different from the normal two days workshop, as the amount of work required from the student is much more.

Is this course an original project?

We have taken material from the World Health Organisation’s Communication for Behavioral Impact tool kit (COMBI), which is a set of techniques for communication experts to use and understand the audiences that they are trying to communicate with, as well as to plan communications.

Why will this course be given online and live?

This three to four months course will comprise separate modules. Each will last approximately a month. Each will have lectures and this delivered by experts from around the world. ,.

It will be online because most of the people who will be taking this course are busy people already working in NGO’s, ministries of health, or in the field of health communication. It is going to be difficult for them to take few months off to do this course.

So, we have made it possible for them to access this course wherever they are. It will be extremely interactive.  It is not going to be seating and looking through power points. There will be live lectures in a virtual classroom. So wherever you may be seating, – in Bangkok, in New Delhi, in Singapore or even in a small village in Cambodia – you will be able to participate in this virtual classroom,  as long as you will have Internet access. We will have experts delivering lectures. You will be able to ask these experts questions. You will be able to interact with your own classmates virtually through chat. When you will take this course, you will also become part of a network of people like yourselves who are working across the region. You will get to know each other virtually and you will build a network of practices in this way. This is an important added value we are bringing to this field of trainings for responding to diseases outbreak.

What concepts will this course specifically address?

One of the aims of this course is to empower communication officials with solid knowledge. Participants will learn concepts of social marketing, basic anthropological concepts to be able to understand how different communities understand diseases.  They will learn how to plan communications and how to evaluate communications. They will learn how to organize communications within the larger framework of disease management and public health and disease outbreak management.

Who can attend this course?

This course is primarily targeted at Ministries of Health, NGO’s, and community level workers. Anyone who his tasked with responding to a disease situation through communicating would find this course, I think, very, very useful.

Is this course only for health workers in Asia?

This course is primarily targeted toward Asia, because there is very little Asia specific training material available. Furthermore, it is very useful to tailor regional training programmes, because the world is a large and diverse place with many different cultures, languages and ways to respond to diseases. But we hope that the learning methods and the technology that we are pioneering would be applicable elsewhere in the world. We hope that people elsewhere in the world would find it useful, and would in turn borrow the methods that we have used, adapt, built on it and do their own training programmes.

Who has funded this course?

This is a project that is been funded by the University of Hong Kong, through the University Development Fund, with the aim to built a resource base in Hong Kong for the trainings, research and communication needs of the countries in the region. The funding has allowed us to create this pilot course. Once the course is launched end of June, we hope that others will come forward to finance the operational expenses for running this course once or twice a year.

Why is communication as important as medical intervention during a health crisis?

Communication saves life and that, really is what this course is about. When we think about a disease outbreak and how do we respond to it, people tend to think that we need to have medicine, vaccine and all these medical interventions. But if you think about it, very often communication is the most important public health intervention that we can use during a disease outbreak.  Consider a disease like SARS for example. When SARS first broke out, here, in Hong Kong, as well as in other part of Asia and as far away as in Canada, there were no medicine for this, there were no antiviral, there no vaccine. The only thing that public health officials could do was to tell people how best to protect themselves by staying away from crowds, wearing masks and going to a doctor if they felt hill. There are other diseases like this where, very often, communication is the most important public health intervention that you can have. But, often, it is also the hardest public health intervention. 

Why is communication particularly difficult during a health crisis?

How do you communicate during a disease outbreak with people who are very often emotionally upset, with people who are frightened, who don’t know what to do, who see their love ones falling sick? How do you communicate with people at a time like this in a way that they will understand what to do? It is not easy as it sounds. It goes beyond putting on posters or recording public health interventions. Communicators really need to know first of all how people behave during a disease outbreak, how to they respond to a disease outbreak.

Can you give us an example on why it is so important to understand behavioral impact?

Public health officials may understand diseases in a particular way, but the communities that are affected by a disease might understand it in a complete different way.

Some years ago, in Angola, there was an outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever, a rare but deadly viral disease.  International teams were sent to Angola to try and help the local health authorities to deal with the disease, because there was a danger that it could spread. It quickly became apparent that one of the biggest problems was communication.  There was a huge difference between the way affected people understood the disease and the modern biomedical methods of understanding diseases that public health officials use. Even the reasons explaining the disease were different.

In many communities, diseases are often seen as a punishment, from the gods, or the result of supernatural forces, , which make it difficult to tell people what to do during a disease outbreak. It is important for communication experts to understand first of all how do local people understand and perceive a disease. How to they respond to the kind of public health advices that is coming from experts?

For example, during an Ebola outbreak it is important that family members do not get close to the dead body because the body fluids contain the virus, which can be transmitted. But for family, it is very hard because when a love one dies you want to do the proper funeral procedure. If those funeral customs include washing the body, it is really hard to tell people: don’t wash your love one’s body. So, how do you do that? How do you communicate? How do you start a dialogue between affected communities and public health officials to find a mutually acceptable and mutually understandable ways of communicating about a disease?

This is what, among other things, this course will be teaching.

Description: A special webpage on Avian Flu Prevention, introducing the nature of the disease, clinical features of the disease, and preventive measures, including fact sheets, guidelines and educational materials such as posters, pamphlets, booklets, stickers, videos, TV announcement, CDs, exhibition boards and powerpoints.
Country/Area: Hong Kong
Language: Chinese and English
Date Revised: January 29, 2013
Agency: Centre for Health and Protection, Department of Health, Hong Kong
Source:
English version: LINK
Chinese version: LINK

Pamphlets:
      

Posters:
    

Exhibition Board:

TV Announcement:
Prevent Avian Flu (Healthy Lifestyle) 
Prevent infections (Household Cleansing)
Prevent Avian Flu (Personal Hygiene)
Prevent Avian Influenza (Travel Tips)
Prevent Avian Influenza (Good Hygiene)
Guard against infections Always wash your hands
Clean tips
Clean tips for school children

Vidoe CDs
Guidelines on Prevetion of Communicable Diseases in Schools, Kindergartens & etc.

Health Talk Slides:

Description: This 12-minutes video introduces about avian flu in humans, including the nature of the disease, history of the influenza and its development, transmission mode, clinical characteristics, and prevention and control measures.
Language: Malay
Agency:  Ministry of Health, Malaysia

Description: This publication provides community guidelines on developing strategies for social mobilization and communication for the prevention and control of dengue fever, based on Communication for Behavioural Impact (COMBI) approach.
Language: Bahasa Malaysia
Year: 2011
Agency: BAHAGIAN PENDIDIKAN KESIHATAN, KEMENTERIAN KESIHATAN MALAYSIA
(The health education branch of Ministry of Health, Malaysia)

Description: This publication provides implementation guidelines on prevention and control of dengue fever, based on the Communication for Behavioural Impact (COMBI) approach.
Language: Bahasa Malaysia
Year: 2005
Agency:  Agency: BAHAGIAN PENDIDIKAN KESIHATAN, KEMENTERIAN KESIHATAN MALAYSIA
(The health education branch of Ministry of Health, Malaysia)

Description: Videos on Preventing Influenza A(H1N1)
Language: Malay
Year: 2011
Agency: Ministry of Health, Malaysia
Source: MedikTV, Official TV for MOH Malaysia

Personal Hygiene Practice

Health Warning on Influenza A(H1N1)

Advice for Travelers on Influenza A(H1N1)

Use facing mask correctly Stop germs from spreading

Description: Animations on rabies vaccination and “Q&A” about rabies
Language: Chinese (Mandarin)
Year: 2011
Agency:  Taichung City Animal Protection and Health Inspection Office, Taiwan
Source: The Website 

Rabies Vaccination                                  Rabies Q & A

Description: TV announcements/educational videos promoting hand hygiene and infection control.
Language: Chinese and English
Agency: Centre for Health Protection, Hong Kong SAR

Guard against infections
Always wash your hands

Clean Tips

Clean tips for school children