The Minister of Health Dr Chris Baryomunsi has used a high-level United Nations meeting on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response today, to press for a fundamentally regional approach to outbreak readiness, arguing that diseases “do not recognise a border” and that health systems must be built to match.
While addressing fellow Ministers and officials, Minister Baryomunsi, pointed to the country’s experience battling Ebola alongside the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan as proof that outbreaks are inherently cross-border problems.
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He noted that while people, trade and health workers move freely between nations, “pathogens move too” — meaning cooperation on surveillance, laboratories and response teams needs to begin long before a case ever reaches a border post.
Uganda drew a pointed comparison between its own outbreak, which was contained, and the continuing transmission of a related epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo, arguing the difference wasn’t that one country’s system was superior, but that outbreaks behave differently depending on context.
The Minister said that preparedness cannot be treated as a fixed checklist because systems need to be able to learn and adapt in real time.
Minister Baryomunsi also called for a shift in how preparedness itself is measured — away from static counts of labs and trained personnel and toward what he called “response velocity,” or how fast a country can move from initial signal to actual response on the ground.
On financing, he urged donors and partners to focus not just on funding levels but on speed and flexibility, calling for contingency financing, regional risk-pooling and insurance mechanisms so money is ready to move the moment an early warning appears.
In his address, Dr Baryomunsi also referenced an ongoing outbreak of Bundibugyo virus involving a genomically distinct viral cluster, which the he cited as a reminder of how much remains unknown about how such viruses emerge.
He underscored the need for continued genomic surveillance and “One Health” research linking human, animal and environmental health and offered to work with regional neighbours and international partners to build shared preparedness models, framing the broader goal as one of solidarity.
Minister Baryomunsi made it categorically clear that ambition should not simply be to prepare individual countries for the next pandemic, but should be to prepare neighbours to protect one another.
