On October 8, MOBILISE project partner Georg Duscher from the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES) participated in a panel discussion at the Disaster Research Days in Vienna. The session, titled Exploring the Intersection of Public Health and Disaster Management, focused on the challenges and innovations in public health responses to disasters.
Georg Duscher’s participation in the panel was centered on highlighting the MOBILISE project’s contribution to the development of mobile labs and their applications in responding to infectious disease outbreaks. He was joined by experts from various fields, including Pavel Truchly of the International Security and Emergency Management Institute and Helmut Schrom-Feiertag from the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. The session was moderated by Olga Vybornova from the University of Louvain.
The discussion touched upon the many applications of mobile labs, particularly their ability to detect zoonotic diseases in diverse settings, including at borders, in the field, and within hospitals. Operational mobile labs were also presented as valuable tools to support Emergency Medical Teams (EMT) and hospitals in managing infectious disease outbreaks. The panel also addressed communication challenges within a One Health framework, underscoring the need for better coordination between sectors to improve crisis management. Overall, the development of mobile labs was showcased as a success story in cross-collaboration, demonstrating the importance of partnerships in addressing public health and disaster management challenges.
The Disaster Research Days 2024, organized in partnership with CERIS and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s European Science and Technology Advisory Group (E-STAG), was co-hosted by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF), the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research, and Education (BMBWF), and the Disaster Competence Network Austria (DCNA).