How to Prepare for Emerging Disease

What is an emerging disease?

   An emerging disease is a new infectious disease that has never happened before and requires time to research and find a cure. It is also a disease found in a new geographical area, re-emerging infectious disease, antimicrobial resistant organism, and an emerging disease can also be caused by biological substances created by humans.
Emerging diseases can be caused by many factors, such as demographic changes, changes in pathogens, the incorrect use of medicines causing resistance to antibiotics, advances in technology, changes in human lifestyle and behavior, more convenient travelling and nature disturbance. These factors spread diseases quickly, and they also speed up the emergence of many new infectious diseases. So far, across the world and Thailand have experienced many emerging diseases, including SARS, bird flu, Ebola virus, Zika virus and COVID-19, the newest emerging disease people around the world are currently dealing with.

When can we say the emerging disease is “severe”?

After the emergence of a new disease, another concern is the spread of the disease. The spread level is an indicator of the disease severity in order to assess the situation for dealing with it afterwards. We can divide the spread level into 4 levels as follows:

• Endemic is a disease that occurs regularly in an area, such as an epidemic in a city, country or continent with a stable and predictable morbidity rate, such as dengue fever in Thailand.
• Outbreak is an event the number of patients increases abnormally or more than expected, such as the outbreak of dengue fever in 2019 and the outbreak of the COVID-19 in Wuhan.
• Epidemic spreads widely and geographically and later spreads to other countries or continents, such as the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014-2016 and the outbreak of COVID-19.
• Pandemic (global) is a global outbreak, such as 2009 swine flu pandemic and, most recently, COVID-19 outbreak in at least 122 countries around the world.
  

How to Prepare for Emerging Disease

From the spread level of the diseases above, regardless of the severity level, if we are prepared well to deal with the emerging diseases or re-emerging infectious diseases, we will get it through for sure.

• Prepare to find information about the disease. What is it? Is there a cure? How should we do in order to protect ourselves from the disease?
• Prepare to change your lifestyle to be in line with the epidemic situation. When an outbreak occurs, it will definitely affect our lives after this. Whether it's a new normal or next normal, we need to prepare and adapt ourselves to the changing situations.
• Prepare your physical and mental health. Take better care of your health and hygiene. Eat good foods for your body. Take care of your mental health for worry-free living.
• Buy comprehensive health insurance because the situations change all the time. Whether it's a new disease or re-emerging disease, all of them can unstabilize our finance. If you buy a health insurance, no worry about the medical expenses. No matter how much, you are covered.