On February 4, Badeephak Kaosala, 23, a Thai medical student in Wuhan, China, boarded a plane that evacuated him from the center of the coronavirus outbreak. That night he arrived in his home country, which has one of the world’s best records of treating the virus.
Subject to a 14-day quarantine at a naval base east of Bangkok, Badeephak has confidence in Thai doctors and finds comfort in the treatment he is receiving. “To be honest, I don’t mind staying another month. That says a lot,” he said. “The Thai navy has really outdone themselves.”
Thailand’s experiences in developing medical staff and modern facilities can be traced to King Chulalongkorn, or Rama V, a visionary monarch who reigned from 1868 to 1910. That was an era marked by the medical advances made by the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur; the English surgeon Joseph Lister, who pioneered the use of antiseptics; and the German physician Robert Koch, who isolated the bacterial causes of anthrax, tuberculosis and cholera, and developed safeguards to improve public health.
King Rama V opened the country’s first full-scale hospital in 1888 to fight cholera and other tropical illnesses, and Thailand began adopting modern medical practices, leading to development of research labs and international collaborations.
Those medical advancements have helped the country weather bouts of fatal epidemics and raised hopes of minimizing the impact of the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, experts say.
In October 2019, the found Thailand was better prepared for a global health threat than any other Asian country and ranked it sixth most ready in the world. The United States was ranked first in the assessment and benchmarking of health security across the 195 countries that make up the States Parties to the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations.
On January 11, Thailand became the first country outside China to have confirmed a patient with COVID-19 infection. Since then, it has recorded 11 recoveries, according to Tanarak Plipat, deputy director of Thailand’s Department of Disease Control.
“Among countries in Asia, Thailand is one of the better prepared and equipped to determine whether people acquire coronavirus infection or not,” said epidemiologist Arthur Reingold at the University of California-Berkeley's School of Public Health, who has worked on the prevention and control of infectious diseases in developing countries around the world.
“Thailand has good laboratory capacity for testing specimens,” he said. “And they have good capacity in epidemiology, compared to many, many countries.”
Thai doctors said the country’s health care system benefitted from the royal family’s ambitious interest in public health. King Rama V sent one of his sons, Prince Mahidol, to study medicine and public health at Harvard University.
Before , the prince served as a negotiator for Thailand to receive Western medical expertise through the Rockefeller Foundation. At the time, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil sought to increase investment in Thailand, where since 1894, selling kerosene under the Chicken and Eagle brand. During the 1920s, the foundation brought experts to help the tropical country , such as hookworms, which affected more than 300,000 Thais.
Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said a contemporary example of Thailand’s advanced medical collaboration was a network known as MORU. A joint effort between Oxford University and Mahidol University, it was named after the prince, Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit.
A son of Prince Mahidol, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, or Rama IX, who reigned from 1946 until his death in 2016, adopted his father’s medical causes.
“King Rama IX played a vital role in creating a public health infrastructure. He had thought about plans to handle communicable diseases,” said Dr. Sopon Mekthon, chairman of the state-run Government Pharmaceutical Organization.
One of the biggest public health threats in the past 40 years was the spread of HIV in the late 1980s and 1990s that infected hundreds of thousands of people in Thailand. Today, the country’s medical know-how and openness to international outreach helps the government contain HIV.
In 2016, Thailand became the first country in Asia to eliminate , according to the World Health Organization. Its effectiveness in public health management during the also gained recognition by WHO.