The increasing frequency and scale of infectious disease outbreaks present both challenges and unique opportunities for aviation medicine. Key drivers such as rapid unplanned urbanisation, climate change, and increased global connectivity create conditions for rapid disease spread, and the aviation and travel health sector is both a vulnerable point and a critical intervention opportunity in securing global health security.
This lecture examines the evolving landscape of infectious disease threats and their implications for global air travel, while exploring innovative approaches to pandemic preparedness. From the COVID-19 pandemic to other outbreak experiences, we will explore the effectiveness of various aviation-specific interventions implemented, including novel approaches that facilitated the safe resumption of air travel, such as risk-calibrated border measures, automated public health systems, and integration of digital health/vaccine certificates.
We will discuss a modular approach to future preparedness and response, and opportunities for aviation medicine to strengthen its preparedness capabilities. These include developing scalable health operations that can be swiftly modified based on specific threat characteristics, leveraging technology to enable real-time data sharing and enhance health measures, and building robust collaborative networks for coordinated responses. These examples illustrate how aviation medicine can adapt and innovate under crisis conditions.
Professor Vernon Lee is a preventive medicine physician with extensive global health experience in pandemic preparedness and response, infectious disease epidemiology and health policy and management. He played an instrumental role in developing and implementing Singapore's COVID-19 pandemic response, and has also responded to the 2003 SARS outbreak, 2009 influenza pandemic, and the 2016 Zika outbreak in Singapore.
Prof Lee previously served as Advisor to the Assistant Director General for Health, Security and Environment at the WHO headquarters in Geneva; Medical Epidemiologist in the WHO's Country Office in Indonesia; and Head of the Biodefence Centre in the Singapore Armed Forces. Through his work, Prof Lee has been involved in major global health security collaborations, and in developing pandemic preparedness plans, risk assessment and disease management programmes. He continues to serve on expert committees at the international level.
An avid supporter of evidence-based health policy, Prof Lee has published about 200 scientific papers, many in top journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and the Lancet journals. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Singapore's Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health.
Prof Lee graduated from medical school at the National University of Singapore. He also holds a PhD in epidemiology from the Australian National University, and the Master in Public Health and Master of Business Administration degrees from the Johns Hopkins University, USA.
Professor Vernon LEE, BBM
MBBS, PhD, FAMS, MPH, MBA
Chief Executive Officer,
Communicable Diseases Agency