The biological surveillance and early detection of biological incidents to address emerging infectious diseases in Vietnam and also in Southeast Asia are limited, and this poses numerous complex long-term challenges to the Southeast Asia community. Especially, the limitation of practical knowledge and exercises for health care workers and medical students in biosafety practices in laboratories could lead to the low capacity to take surge actions in management and control of future pandemics.
The appearance of new pathogens such SARS, COVID-19 caused by coronaviruses or MERS-CoV. Those diseases have been considered to originate from wildlife. Wildlife surveillance to detect new or unknown pathogens should be concerned. Within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, Viet Nam is known as a “densely populated neighbor” of China with the high risk areas transmission of coronavirus if the health care system is not preparedness and response. At the early stage of the coronavirus attacking the country, the Vietnamese Government has soon come up with effective measures to prevent and control the spread of the virus with rigorous quarantine policies, and carried out a complete tracing of all people who came in contact with the virus. However, the country capacities to cope with the tumultuous attack of the virus as well as the capacity of the laboratory service to deal with the mass diagnostics are still questioned.
To prepare for and respond to the epidemic/pandemic like COVID-19 in the future, we realized the university’s laboratories as the potential facilities to assist the National Pandemic Prevention and Control Taskforce at different levels on early detection, investigation and management of epidemics/pandemics. First of all, to protect people directly involved in prevention and control of epidemics/pandemics, we need to equip knowledge and skills on biosafety, as well as biological risk management to sample collectors, laboratory technicians, epidemiologists, as well as medical students who are participating in case investigations and surveillance