Surveillance and pandemic governance in least‐ideal contexts: The Philippine case

Outbreak preparedness and response strategies in ASEAN member states: a scoping review

Objectives

The 21st century has witnessed significant disease outbreaks with severe impact in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, including SARS, H1N1, H5N1, and COVID-19. This review aimed to compile and analyze outbreak preparedness and response strategies, highlighting the success of coordinated multi-sectoral approaches and policy responses within the ASEAN region.

Methods

The protocol for this review was registered on the Open Science Framework and PROSPERO. A systematic analysis of publications from the 2002-2022 period was conducted following PRISMA guidelines on 4522 records retrieved from PubMed, CINAHL, Web of Science, and Scopus. The titles and abstracts were screened, and 229 articles were selected for full-text screening. Finally, 34 articles were included in this review.

Results

Four preparedness pillars were identified: governance and stewardship, disease detection, disease prevention, and health care management. The pillars were crucial in preparing for and responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Coordinated responses among the ASEAN countries and local and international stakeholders were reported.

Conclusions

The findings emphasize that understanding the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases is paramount for effective disease prevention, surveillance, and timely response efforts to prevent the next pandemic. A well-coordinated multi-country and multi-agency policy response and understanding the different disease management models are crucial in addressing future outbreaks in the region. Future post-pandemic publications will shed more light on lessons learned and preparedness and response plans for future pandemics.

When safety for you means danger for me: the racial politics of carceral public safety discourse

Safety is a human right and universal need, and yet we as researchers and practitioners often take for granted the conditions that help people feel safe. In this conceptual review, we focus on factors that contribute to people's sense of safety in service of understanding how, when, and where people feel safe. Moreover, we consider how race, power, and privilege shape people's sense of safety and danger. In doing so, we highlight how public safety is not an objective or static reality but rather a political project that reflects dominant ideologies and serves state interests. We begin this conceptual review with a discussion of how public safety is a social construct whose meaning varies across time, space, and place. Next, we discuss three dominant ideologies that are embedded within collective public safety discourse: permanent bad guy syndrome, the victimization-fear paradox, and the politics of ideal victimhood. Together, these ideologies help to shape carceral public safety frameworks, which is the dominant paradigm in our culture. We then illuminate some of the underlying assumptions within carceral public safety frameworks and their implications for responses to public safety concerns, including elevating the safety concerns of dominant groups while criminalizing undesirable bodies, undermining stigmatized communities' ability to access public safety and justice, legitimizing suspicion and surveillance, incentivizing carceral responses while diverting resources from safety promotion programs, and altering public spaces. In doing so, we highlight how carceral public safety frameworks reflect and reinforce existing injustices while also contributing to the stigmatization, marginalization, and manufactured precarity of social groups deemed undesirable and therefore unworthy of protection. We conclude with a discussion of alternative models of public safety which are rooted in life-affirming frameworks, which focus on improving people's material conditions as a means of lessening and preventing the likelihood and impact of interpersonal violence.