Australia’s pandemic influenza ‘Protect’ phase: emerging out of the fog of pandemic

Recent sociological analyses of contemporary emergency planning foreground a potential break between preparedness plans animated by the spectre of an imaginary future catastrophe and classical public health efforts that are anchored in close knowledge of populations and efforts to prevent the transmission of disease. Whilst scholarly analysis to date suggests that the distinct rationales of public health governance underpinning these different approaches are likely to be entwined and to work in productive tension with each other, less attention has been paid to how this tension plays out in practice. Using 27 semi-structured interviews with public health experts involved in the development or implementation of Australia’s pandemic influenza plan, this paper examines how preparedness efforts established in anticipation of a catastrophic threat were reconfigured during the Australian 2009 (H1N1) pandemic influenza. Specifically, one Australian state broke with the national plan and rapidly inserted an entirely new pandemic phase – which became known as ‘Protect’ – into their response, thereby providing a critical reorientation in the ‘fog of pandemic’. Our analysis indicates that classical population health efforts interrupted not only the vision of catastrophe embedded within the plans, but the actual plans and their implementation, forcing the public health response in a new direction.     

Framing post-pandemic preparedness: Comparing eight European plans

Framing has previously been studied in the field of pandemic preparedness and global health governance and influenza pandemics have usually been framed in terms of security and evidence-based medicine on a global scale. This paper is based on the pandemic preparedness plans, published after 2009, from eight European countries. We study how pandemic preparedness is framed and how pandemic influenza in general is narrated in the plans. All plans contain references to ‘uncertainty’, ‘pandemic phases’, ‘risk management’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘surveillance’. These themes were all framed differently in the studied plans. The preparedness plans in the member states diverge in ways that will challenge the ambition of the European Union to make the pandemic preparedness plans interoperable and to co-ordinate the member states during future pandemics.     

Securitising health: Australian newspaper coverage of pandemic influenza

This paper analyses contemporary Australian newspaper coverage of the threat of pandemic influenza in humans, specifically in the light of recent transformations in biomedical and public health understandings of infectious disease as continuously emerging. Our analysis suggests that the spectre of pandemic influenza is characterised, in newspaper accounts, as invoking a specific form of nation building. The Australian nation is depicted as successfully securing itself in the face of a threat from Asia (and in the absence of an effective international health body). What is described in newspaper accounts reflects a shift in the public health response to infectious disease. This response does not entail a direct focus on protecting either the population or national territory. Instead, it involves the continuous rehearsal of readiness to react to disasters through the networking of government and private agencies responsible for maintaining critical infrastructure. In this way, coverage of pandemic influenza positions health as central to national security, with little reporting of the reasons for or the potential implications of this alliance. Thus, the imperative to 'be prepared' is presented as self-evident.