International Ministerial Conference on Animal and Human Influenza, Hanoi 2010
Statement of Japan addressed by H.E. Mr. Mitsuo SAKABA, Ambassador of Japan to the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam

April 21, 2010

Mme chair,
Ladies and gentlemen,

Allow me to announce, at the outset, that the total amount of Japan's international cooperation on animal and pandemic influenza has reached 416 million US dollar in total since 2005 till today (FY 2010), which is the second largest amount among bilateral donors, as just presented by the World Bank. Japan mainly aims to improve the preparedness of its regional partners through the financial and technical cooperation.

The administration of Prime Minister Hatoyama is committed to the regional cooperation to respond to the threat of influenza as a part of its efforts to realize the concept of East Asia community initiative. My Government is going to carry out the following four major cooperation programs this year:

(1) A variety of Japanese ministries and agencies will continue to support the capacity development of National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE) in Viet Nam, to which we have extended technical and research cooperation, as well as assisted it to construct a laboratory with Bio-safety Level 3;

(2) Japan will continue to support regional partners, including Viet Nam, through its contributions to WHO and OIE, to enhance the surveillance capacity, to improve the administrative and other capacity in the veterinary related areas and to strengthen the pandemic preparedness;

(3) In the area of Research & Development, Japan is implementing "The Program of founding Research Center for Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases". Through this program, Japanese universities and research institutes will continue to cooperate with their counterparts in eight (8) Asian and African countries; and

(4) Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), in close cooperation with Japanese institutes such as National Institute for Infectious Diseases (NIID), will contribute to human resource development through its training programs in which experts of developing countries are invited to participate.

Through the experience of the pandemic H1N1 of 2009, we learned important lessons on public health and international cooperation. It is critically important to assess and evaluate these lessons to improve our future efforts in this area. On the positive side, we need to underscore that the series of Ministerial Conferences have greatly improved multi-sectoral preparedness and advanced the international cooperation, which has shown its impact in our fight against H1N1 pandemic influenza.

Now we need to maintain and sustain the achievements that we gained through the international cooperation in an efficient manner. For instance, human capacity and laboratories that have been developed through the response to H5N1 and H1N1 can be sustained as a part of health system strengthening.

Although United Nations and WHO made great efforts to assess the gap in the developing countries, we need to admit that these agencies faced difficulty in developing and implementing appropriate plans of assistance, while taking into account of each specific situation of different situation of different countries. Equally difficult was the work to distribute limited amount of vaccine in an efficient manner. Japan hopes that WHO, UNSIC and other relevant multilateral agencies will adequately apply the lessons to improve the demarcation of roles and their coordination mechanism.

With regard to H1N1 human vaccines, the international community, both public and private entities, helped vaccination through contributions to WHO, including my Government's grant aid of 10.8 million USD. In this regard, it is important to expand vaccine production capacity in certain developing countries which have sufficient willingness and ability. Japan expects that WHO will launch a new initiative and the private sector will be more engaged in such efforts.

Lastly, I would like to point out that we need to develop concrete measures to realize "One Health" approach, one of the important themes in this Conference. While respecting the ownership of developing countries, Japan will further support the efforts of international organizations and fully utilize the regional frameworks such as Japan-ASEAN cooperation, Mekong-Japan cooperation, ASEM, APEC and Japan-China-Korea Tripartite cooperation, with the aim to strengthen our preparedness and response.

Thank you very much.