The US and the EU agreed on 7 November at a
meeting in Ottawa to work more closely to combat the threat of
bioterrorism. Reuters reports that, along with Japan, Canada,
France, Germany, Italy, Mexico and the UK, they agreed to
improve research co-operation and look into the possibility of
jointly acquiring vaccines and antibiotics.
Much of the health ministers meeting focused on the threat
from smallpox with the US indicating that it intends to
stockpile 300 million doses of a smallpox vaccine. Canada
is also looking at increasing its existing stockpile whilst
Japan said it would obtain 2.5 million doses of the
smallpox vaccine which it sees as enough to deal with a
smallpox outbreak in a large urban centre.
Reuters quotes Canadian Health Minister
Allan Rock as saying: “We agreed that working together
presents an opportunity for us to influence cost and that’s
something we’ll be taking into account…(common
procurement) is one of the possibilities we discussed.”
Before leaving for the meeting, EU
Commissioner for Health David Byrne had emphasised the
importance of international co-operation. “We need to come
up with a plan for improving health security – and we also
have to coordinate international cooperation with our
partners the candidate countries, the US, the WHO and the
OECD”, he said.