Keeping S’poreans safe against the next pandemic

14/01/2025

THE NEXT global pandemic is inevitable — not if but when.  

Public health researchers at institutions such as Harvard University and Georgetown University recently reminded the world of this medical truism — and the concurrent fact that the overall global community will not be ready for this next crisis.  

But Singapore bucks this trend.   

The PAP government’s Ministry of Health is establishing the Communicable Diseases Agency (CDA) in the first half of 2025. This CDA consolidates the public health functions against infectious diseases. It will safeguard Singaporeans’ health and livelihoods the way the government did during the baptism of fire that was the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“CDA will oversee end-to-end disease prevention, surveillance and risk assessment, preparedness and response, and disease and outbreak management,” said Minister of State for Health Rahayu Mahzam this past week to Parliament (7 Jan). “This will allow the Government to quickly respond to disease outbreaks as one concerted public health effort.” 

Readying Singaporeans for a second baptism of fire 

The “policy and scientific recommendations” of the CDA will support this rapid crisis response, said MOS Rahayu.  

The CDA will work together with the Ministry of Health (MOH) and other agencies, such as the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) and the Health Promotion Board (HPB), to carry out these recommendations. 

“These will include a calibrated combination of public health and social measures that include case investigation, contact tracing, masking, physical distancing, and border control measures,” detailed MOS Rahayu. 

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Source: Rahayu Mahzam / Facebook, MDDI 

Beyond ‘respond’, the CDC’s four other areas of responsibility include ‘prevent’, ‘prepare’, ‘detect’ and ‘enable’. 

These responsibilities translate into public education and a robust vaccine policy against the spread of disease. They additionally mean preparing a whole-of-Singapore readiness across multiple sectors for pandemics. 

“CDA will strengthen our surveillance capabilities, including exploring the use of new modalities of surveillance such as through genomic testing and wastewater testing to supplement traditional surveillance approaches,” said MOS Rahayu on how the agency will help detect infectious disease situations locally and internationally. 

Such new detection methods will be especially useful since infectious disease situations keep evolving, a lesson learned through the COVID pandemic, when infection rates waxed and waned over time.  

Meanwhile, the CDA will also conduct local and international public health research. It will also share information and expertise with its overseas counterparts. This enables scientifically robust, data-driven responses to public health situations. 

“For instance, research conducted during COVID-19 allowed us to determine the duration people infected by COVID-19 were likely to remain infectious,” said MOS Rahayu. “This in turn informed the duration of isolation for these individuals so as to prevent transmission.”    

The CDA will keep Singaporeans protected and healthy, building our strengths, including a highly developed medical research sector and efficient government public policy.  

In the event of another pandemic, Singapore and Singaporeans will be united and ready. 

It is the PAP working arm-in-arm with fellow Singaporeans for the public good, all while taking Singapore forward.