Episode 38 - Orla Condell - A Health Emergency Task Force

ECDC: On Air

European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

Science

5 • 3 Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2023

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With the pandemic lessons in mind, steps are taken for Europe to be stronger and better prepared to tackle current and emerging threats of infectious diseases.

ECDC’s new reinforced mandate gives the agency a stronger role to support the EU Member States with surveillance, joint preparedness and response planning and issue stronger guidance during emergencies.

Orla Condell, an Emergency Preparedness and Response expert from ECDC, shares in this episode her insights on the process of building an EU Health Task Force to mobilise and deploy outbreak assistance teams and to strengthen preparedness capacities.

For more on the EU Health Task Force visit the dedicated page here.

For general information about ECDC, please visit ⁠⁠⁠ecdc.europa.eu⁠⁠⁠, or follow us on ⁠⁠⁠social media⁠⁠⁠.

Transcript

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0:00.0	ECDC on air.
0:05.0	The podcast of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
0:09.0	Keeping up to date with European Epidemiology.
0:13.0	Hello, my name is Nicholas and I'm your host for today's episode of ECDC on Air,
0:19.0	which is the podcast for the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.
0:22.9	ECDC has a new mandate, which includes the creation of a new EU Health Task Force,
0:27.5	which provides effective operational response and crisis preparedness support on the ground
0:32.0	and also remotely. today. Today with me in the studio, I have Arla Condell, expert in emergency preparedness and response, and she's here to talk about this
0:55.6	new European Union Health Task Force. So I think before we begin, could you just tell us a little
1:00.5	bit about your background and how you came to ECDC? Sure. So by background, I'm a microbiologist.
1:05.6	I was working in research and then moved to public health back in 2013 when I did the Euphem Fellowship.
1:11.9	So this is the ECDC Fellowship Program where I was based in Denmark.
1:16.2	After the fellowship, I moved to WHO, where I worked from 2015 up until just before starting
1:23.3	at ECDC and I was working at country office level.
1:26.6	I worked in three different countries, so first
1:28.7	in Liberia and West Africa in response to the Ebola outbreak. And then I moved to the Western
1:34.0	Pacific and I was working in Cambodia short term following the Zika crisis and then spent the most
1:39.9	of my time, so just over four years in the Vietnam Country Office. I moved to ECDC in October,
1:47.2	not last year, the year before in 2021. And I've been working mostly on Health Task Force since
1:53.4	arriving here. Could we then hear from you a little bit? What is really this EU Health Task Force?
1:58.7	So basically the background to setting up the new EU Health Task Force was throughout the COVID-19
2:04.3	pandemic. There was demonstrated shortcomings in EU mechanisms for managing health threats.
	...

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