Shipment process under way on 13 May 2024 at CPHL in Aden, Yemen. Photo credit: WHO/K. Mayas8 July 2024 – Influenza virus sharing is essential to prepare the world against pandemics. Virus sharing also enables the development of candidate vaccine viruses, surveillance for resistance to antiviral medicines, and revision of diagnostic reagents and test kits.

Owing to the ongoing conflict in Yemen, the country has been unable to share virus samples every year with the WHO Collaborating Centers under the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS). On 14 May 2024, Yemen succeeded for the first time in shipping the first 50 samples of seasonal influenza viruses to the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza in London.

During the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, Yemen’s Ministry of Public Health and Population designated the Central Public Health Laboratories (CPHL) as the National Influenza Centre. Following the COVID-19 emergency, Yemen has adapted its respiratory disease surveillance system to monitor both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 viruses. This was done with support from WHO headquarters and the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean.

Since then, Yemen has been expanding its services for the subtyping of influenza and other respiratory viruses to feed into this new national integrated surveillance programme and GISRS.

Headquarters and Regional Office experts arranged a mission to Yemen in March 2022 in coordination with the WHO Country Office in Yemen. The mission’s aims were to reactivate influenza sentinel sites, which had been suspended during the COVID-19 emergency; train Ministry of Public Health and Population and CPHL staff on virus testing and on sharing influenza viruses with human pandemic potential, as per the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework; and to ensure that CPHL has met the WHO requirements for testing procedures for respiratory viruses.

As of January 2023, samples are being collected at influenza sentinel sites. They are then shipped to the CPHL’s governorate-level National Centre for confirmation by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. The next step should be to share confirmed samples with the WHO Collaborating Centre in London. Logistics have, however, prevented this until May 2024.

Dry ice, needed to ship samples internationally, has been unavailable in Yemen since 2015 owing to the war and an embargo. With support and facilitation from WHO, however, dry ice was received in Aden from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This was transported via a United Nations Humanitarian Air Service flight from Addis Ababa to Aden; the same plane then took the packaged samples on to Amman, Jordan. The samples made the last leg of their journey, from Amman to London, via international courier.

The same coordination mechanism will be used for future shipments of influenza virus samples until Yemen is able to produce dry ice.