Airport workers and Customs and Immigration staff are taking part in a workshop to learn more about blocking diseases from entering the Island.

The Prevention and Management of Public Health Events in Civil Aviation workshop kicked off yesterday, and aims to to provide an understanding of the international legal instruments designed to help “protect all participating nations from the international spread of disease” via air travel.

Trevor Moniz, the Minister of Health, welcomed participants by reminding them of the 2003 SARS outbreak in Hong Kong that killed more than 700 people. The disease then spread to Canada where 250 cases were reported.

“One view is that SARS was only a two hour direct-flight from Bermuda — on our doorstep,” Mr Moniz said adding that the World Health Organisation subsequently developed new International Health Regulations (IHR) which have to be implemented by this year.

“To this end, the IHR contain rights and obligations for Bermuda and all nations concerning national and international surveillance, assessment and public health response, health measures applied by Bermuda to international travellers, aircraft, and goods and public health controls at airports,” Mr Moniz said.

“The old approach was simply stated as quarantine. The new approach is an ‘all hazards’ approach which is more than addressing a list of specific infectious diseases. It is intended to protect against all acute public health threats.

“Not only is the airport more complex operationally, but also IHR requires us to be able to provide an adapted and real time response. We are being challenged to embrace generic public health emergency contingency planning as a team. This should cause us as examine our relationships, communications, command and control, decision making, resources and inter-operational planning — no easy task.

Mr Moniz said he was confident that participants and Bermuda would benefit from the workshop.

“You will emerge from this workshop strengthened — both as collaborators and partners,” he said. “These new regulations are regarded as the single most important piece of public health legislation to come about in decades and I can assure you of Bermuda’s willingness to embrace them.”