Two new documents are now online.

The first is the Pan American Health Organization's Strategic Plan for a secure and disaster-resilient health sector, covering the period 2008-12. This document is in line with PAHO's overarching Strategic Plan for the same period, which responds to the long-term Health Agenda for the Americas, a collective call to action and an instrument to "guide the collective action of national and international stakeholders who seek to improve the health of the peoples of this Region." The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have made considerable progress in reducing the health impact of major emergencies and disasters. Although national level disaster preparedness is relatively well-advanced in the Americas, historically our work has tended to progress in isolation from initiatives in other regions of the world. The last five years has shown us that more and more institutional players are becoming active in the health preparedness and risk reduction field and that we can no longer be an ‘island’, separated from the broader international health community. The Strategic Plan can be downloaded here.

The second is a discussion paper on global humanitarian trends and their potential impact on the countries of the Americas that was prepared in response to conversations with regional health authorities. This document was discussed at and revised following a high-level consultation in April. The topic of disaster management has grown steadily and gained an increasingly important place on the health agenda of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, the increasing number of actors, the improved capacity at local and regional level and globalization is quickly changing how we deal with risk reduction and disaster management. To address this changing environment, PAHO/WHO organized a high-level consultation to analyze the situation and revise a position paper written to keep the Region's ministries of health and other actors abreast of what may be in store when a major disaster occurs. The Executive Report of the deliberations of this meeting, a list of participants and the revised discussion paper can be downloaded here.