«We will not easily get rid of the Covid“. To say it Gianni Rezza, Director of Prevention of the Ministry of Health, at the Amit Congress (Topics of Infectious and Tropical Diseases) in progress in Milan. “Ma in the future – he adds – we will have to be ready to face new pandemics due to unknown pathogens. The next pandemic could be due to a flu virus, but also to a different agent ». Rezza explains: «We will need to be ready with pandemic plans both against influenza viruses and other broader spectrum ones, building on what we have learned from the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Rezza: “We must prepare for new pandemics”
To prepare for future pandemics, according to Rezza, “it will be necessary to always have personal protective equipment available, with stocks to defend health workers and communities, as well as investing in drugs and vaccines”. Rezza then highlighted how the scientific community was taken a little by surprise with the Covid pandemic: “When we talk about the big one, we all expected a pandemic from influenza, avian or swine, and instead we found ourselves faced with continuous health emergencies caused by coronavirus ». But if with Sars in the West it was only “marginally touched”, and MERS “did not represent a significant threat globally, Covid was an unexpected event, with this new coronavirus. How and where it actually started is not yet known ».
Compared to the current phase, “with a mass vaccination campaign the goal is to return to normality, which however is supported by the maintenance of at least individual precautionary measures – continues Rezza – The data tell us that with the increase in vaccination coverage , there is a massive decrease in intensive care hospitalizations, and even if vaccines no longer guarantee us 90% protection from infection, they still guarantee us a high level of protection from serious illness, thus avoiding congestion in hospitals, which is the first objective of a vaccination campaign ». Rezza then concluded by recalling “how there is a silent and underestimated epidemic, that of antibiotic resistance, we must not forget. It is a chronic emergency, albeit not an acute one, which we will have to deal with in the coming years, a very important phenomenon in Italy, to which we should devote the utmost attention ».
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