New guidelines for assessing infectious disease risks

The National Administration of Disease Prevention and Control on Friday announced a regulation that aims to enhance the assessment of the risks associated with infectious disease outbreaks. The document recommended that outbreak control authorities at various levels of government should collaborate with authorities in health, agriculture, forestry and grassland, education, customs, transportation, market regulations, and meteorological departments to regularly share information related to potential outbreaks and jointly carry out risk assessments. National and provincial health authorities should gather experts in a variety of fields, such as preventive medicine, clinical medicine, biosecurity, emergency management, communication and economics, to form a panel to carry out risk assessments of epidemics. The administration's emphasis on risk assessment is essential to enhancing the nation's ability to monitor and issue early warnings of infectious diseases and to solve major public health hazards, the administration said. National and provincial disease control bodies should conduct weekly risk assessments, while municipal and county-level facilities should perform monthly inspections. Specialized risk assessment should be made on occasions such as when a novel and acute infectious disease develops, when an infectious illness is imported from abroad for the first time and causes domestic transmission, or when the incidence or mortality rate of a virus appears to be an abnormal pattern.