“Preparing regional leaders with the knowledge, training and instruments for information sharing and decision-making against biological threats and pandemics”

In emergency situations, life or death is often determined within the first few minutes of a crisis. The medical knowledge and expertise of first responders, coupled with a reliable emergency response infrastructure can make a critical difference when an unexpected illness, accident or wide-spread disaster occurs. The issues of dealing with CBRN-related incidents is put higher in the agenda in recent years. Expertise in this area is growing but scattered. From an international point of view, differences in approach are partly due to legal and organizational differences between countries. Sometimes differences may come from lessons learnt in incident.

Within the context of NATO-ASI project, it is widely accepted that sharing of expertise is an important step to improve the state-of-the-art knowledge and the approach of dealing with CBRN issues for all people involved in maxi-emergencies and mass-casualties events.