Thai National Influenza Center under the Department of Medical Sciences (DMSc) was formally recognized by World Health Organization (WHO) as a national influenza laboratory in 1972.
The main responsibility of the Thai NIC is to surveillance emerging influenza viruses and to regularly share newly isolated strains with WHO.
In 2003, when the occurrence of Avian Influenza outbreaks was firstly found in Thailand, the NIC in collaboration with WHO and US-CDC decided to organize several training courses for laboratory staff of the networking laboratories to enhance laboratory capacity on swine origin H1N1 virus diagnosis.
Resulting from this, the NIC was designated by WHO as WHO Regional Influenza Reference Laboratory for the South-East Asia Region : WHO RIRL on June 22nd, 2010.