The Japanese government is supporting a regional initiative to preposition medical supplies for future pandemics, and has invested around 1.6 million Swiss Francs worth of supplies in the Philippines, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said Thursday.

“The Japanese government through the Asia European Foundation is supporting a regional initiative to pre-position medical stocks in anticipation of any future pandemics and that includes 1.6 million Swiss francs investment repositioning of stocks here in the Philippines,” Alexander Mattheou, regional director of the IFRC Asia Pacific Regional Office told reporters on the sidelines of the organization’s World Disasters Report Forum.

In pesos, 1.6 million Swiss francs is around P103 million.

Citing the IFRC’s World Disaster Report 2022, Mattheou said that the threat of another pandemic is “very, very real”.

“As the report says, the threat of another pandemic is very, very real in the sense that the conditions for one are much more present now than they were in the past. Because of this population growth, because of the density of populations in urban areas, and because we move around the region and the world so frequently,” he said.

“In other words, the chances of us waiting another hundred years for another pandemic are actually very low. It's much more likely to happen sooner,” he added.

Mattheou said among the lessons to be learned from the report was to trust early warning messages to keep people safer from disasters, that the world needs equity so there will be responders for every disaster in each country, and that people need to think about humanitarian crises.

“Most of all the big complex emergencies in the Asia Pacific, that's primarily in Afghanistan and Myanmar, and the fate of the displaced for India around in Bangladesh, and around Southeast Asia. Because again, it is so easy to forget those crises. And we need equity to give them equal attention,” Mattheou said.

“Because the states are least capable of providing support in those contexts. We need national and localization, local organizations more than ever,” he said.

The IFRC is the world’s largest humanitarian network composed of 191 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Jaspearl Tan/DMS