Focus on Preventing Biological Infections

For one and a half week, between June 1 and 11, 350 medical troops from 14 countries were training for their tasks at the Czech Armed Forces Medical Services Center in Hradec Králove, the Czech Republic. Organized every two years by the Budapest-based NATO Centre of Excellence for Military Medicine (NATO MILMED COE) as part of NATO’s training program, Exercise Vigorous Warrior has been the only exercise of the Alliance in the field of military medicine in 2015, and provided training opportunities for national and international medical units and organizations to practice cooperation.

Col. (MD) Dr. László Fazekas – the officer conducting the exercise – emphasized that the participants were practicing the operation of an international system that is indispensable for providing medical services to fighting troops by US and European standards in ongoing NATO missions.

Due to the recent Ebola virus epidemic in Western Africa, the two-week exercise focused on preventing biological infections so that they can prepare for a potential next epidemic, which may break out even in the area of a NATO-led operation. “During the exercise we brought together NATO’s best equipment and units for use in biological defence", Col. Dr. László Fazekas told us.

The NATO MILMED COE Deputy Director added that besides biological defence, VW 2015 also exercised the furnishing and operation of a multinational field hospital. Built in the Czech barracks, the ROLE-2 field hospital is a health care facility which “provides treatment in an international environment for the whole spectrum of soldiers wounded in action." The hospital is a unit declared to the V4 EU Battle Group, to which all four nations have delegated medical staffs – Hungary, for example have offered a surgical team.

The Mobile Biological Laboratory Complex of the HDF Medical Centre received medical certification on the VW15 exercise. This laboratory complex is a unique capability in NATO because it operates on the highest biosafety level (BSL-4) which means that the mobile laboratory consisting of two containers enables the staff to work with agents at the highest hazard level. Hungary is the only NATO member country to have such a mobile deployable lab of this level. The 12-member staff redeployed the lab from an exercise in Poland to the Czech Republic. In Poland, the lab was declared combat ready by the NATO very high readiness joint task force.

The VW exercises have been organized every two years since 2011. For the first time, Hungary hosted the NATO MILMED COE exercise (in Várpalota and Budapest), and in 2013 the nations of the MILMED COE exercised in Germany. Training for Vigorous Warrior 2017 is to start almost immediately after the end of the 2015 exercise.

Photos by the author