Official Opening Of The Regional Emerging Diseases Intervention Centre

24 May 2004

By Mr Khaw Boon Wan

Venue: Biopolis Way, Chromos Level 2

Speech By Mr Khaw Boon Wan, Acting Minister For Health And Senior Minister Of State For Finance

At The Official Opening Of The

Regional Emerging Diseases Intervention Centre

24 May 2004 At 2.30 Pm

At 20 Biopolis Way, Chromos Level 2

Your Excellency, Mr Claude Allen

Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services,

United States of America

Ambassador Lavin

Friends and colleagues from the World Health Organisation

Distinguished guests

Ladies and Gentlemen

First of all, let me warmly welcome everyone here today.  Thank you for joining us for the official opening of the REDI Centre.

Last year, SARS swept through the world like a hurricane, leaving many casualties in its wake.  Fear gripped the hearts of people, because we knew so little about the disease and we were literally fighting an unknown enemy in the dark. 

Those of us who have read Sun Zi's Art of War, know that a war cannot be won, until you know the enemy well.  So as our doctors and nurses fought bravely in the trenches, improvising from first principle and common sense, the global scientific and public health community sprang into action, analysing and trying to understand this new disease and quickly sharing whatever information they had.  Those who had been dealing with infectious disease outbreaks tapped on their experience to come up with strategies to help SARS-hit countries contain the outbreak.  This global cooperation was a crucial factor behind our success in containing SARS.  We in Singapore know this only too well, because we had benefited from the experts whom the World Health Organisation and the US CDC sent to help us.     

It was against this backdrop that Prime Minister Goh, when he met President Bush in Washington D.C. last May, proposed the establishment of a joint US-Singapore facility to promote cooperation in tackling emerging infectious diseases, whether naturally occurring or man-made. This would include disease surveillance, prevention and research, and outbreak response systems.  It was envisaged that through our collaboration, we could contribute to regional and global efforts to deal with existing infectious diseases and better prepare ourselves to handle future outbreaks of new diseases.

That was exactly one year ago.  Since then, our officials have worked feverishly to flesh out the proposal, and turn it into reality.  This REDI Centre which you see today is the fruition of those efforts, and I am very happy to be here with you today to witness REDI's official birth. 

But getting the physical infrastructure ready is only the first step.  The road ahead is long and challenging.  

First, new and re-emerging diseases will continue to pose a real threat to all of us.  Even as we were dealing with SARS, the US was faced with monkey pox in June last year. In addition, although SARS retreated by July last year just as quickly as it reared its ugly head, we still grappled with the possibility of its resurgence, especially during the Northern Hemisphere winter.  That did not happen, but instead, Nature unleashed the avian flu in East Asia. In Indonesia, dengue claimed the lives of many earlier this year.

More than ever, therefore, we need to work together to strengthen infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response capabilities. Capacity building is critical not only in terms of hard infrastructure, but also in terms of ensuring that our public health officials are properly trained to deal with the various aspects of fighting an outbreak.  As Dr Julie Gerberding, Director of the US CDC told me, it is not just building laboratory facilities, but ensuring that there are people who know how to collect samples and conduct the necessary epidemiology investigations. 

To this end, the REDI Centre can play a useful role, both in organising training programmes and in helping to build a network of trained personnel both in Singapore and the region, who can contribute to the pool of resources which we can call on when dealing with infectious disease outbreaks.

Second, as SARS has taught us, research is critical in enabling us to detect, understand and respond to new health threats.  It is thus important that besides training, another focus of the REDI Centre is fostering collaboration in research on existing and new pathogens.  This would include upstream research on new pathogens, and mid to downstream activities such as the development of test kits and vaccines, and making these available to the market.

The location of the REDI Centre in Biopolis is a unique advantage.  Within this complex, we have brought together Singapore's key bio-medical research institutes and the research units of large private-sector pharma companies such as Novartis, which is REDI's neighbour. The challenge for the REDI Centre is to find creative ways to tap on the expertise and advanced research facilities within Biopolis as well as bridge them with the vast, deep capabilities in the US. 

Third, even as we push collaborative biomedical research, we must not forget the importance of biosafety.  The discussions leading to the establishment of the REDI Centre did not quite address this, but it is indeed something which we should focus our attention on. 

Since the SARS outbreak last year, most experts were concerned that SARS would come back from wherever it hid in nature. Some, however, were just as worried that the next outbreak would be come from SARS samples that somehow escaped from one of the many laboratories working with the virus.  

As it turned out, the latter concern was not unfounded.  There have been at least 3 known instances where SARS was acquired through lapses in laboratory practices, including one which occurred in Singapore. We were fortunate that in all these cases, control measures were imposed swiftly and decisively, thus preventing any of these events from becoming another full-blown SARS outbreak. Nevertheless, it underscores the importance of strict standards and discipline among researchers dealing with infectious disease agents.

Singapore, because of our experience with laboratory-acquired SARS last year, has moved quickly to up the biosafety standards in our laboratories.  We have audited our laboratories, whether BSL 2 or 3, to ensure that biosafety standards are up to scratch.  We are now working on putting in place necessary biosafety legislation.

But biosafety goes beyond audits and legislation. As Dr Anthony Fauci of the U.S. National Institutes of Health put it:  "The secret is formal courses to give new workers intensive training before they can handle dangerous infectious agents. The virologists who get nipped are those who run experienced labs and then have a brand new postdoc or worker who comes in and gets into difficulty." (Lawrence K. Altman, "SARS's Second Act, Playing in Laboratories", The Doctor's World, 18 May 2004)

As Singapore develops our own biosafety framework, we will need to tap on the experience of the US.  And as we gear ourselves up, we must, through the REDI Centre, share the experience gained and make REDI a resource for biosafety, for the region.

So in short, REDI has its work cut out for it.  But it is work for the long haul, and requires a "many-hands" approach.  We need to engage and co-opt as many stakeholders as we can, as we prepare ourselves to do battle with new or re-emerging infectious diseases.

I was, therefore, extremely happy that WHO Director-General Lee Jong Wook, during his visit to Singapore last month, affirmed WHO's commitment to work with the REDI Centre. I look forward to the close cooperation between WHO and REDI.  At the same time, let us focus our efforts to bring the REDI Centre to cruising altitude, after which we can welcome other like-minded economies in the Asia-Pacific region to join us as partners in the Centre.  This will make for a more co-ordinated approach in dealing with any common enemy.

In the coming years, there will be other infectious diseases which will have serious impact on the region.  It is my hope that REDI will do its part to ensure that we are all ready to handle such crises. Through vigilance and cooperation, we can minimise the impact of these new emerging and re-emerging diseases.

Thank you.