Infectious Diseases

The WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence will be a global platform for pandemic and epidemic intelligence, creating shared and networked access to vital multi-sectoral data, driving innovations in data analytics and building the communities
of practice needed to predict, prevent, detect, prepare for and respond to worldwide health threats.

The WHO Hub will be a new global collaboration of countries and partners worldwide, driving innovations to increase availability and linkage of diverse data; develop tools and predictive models for risk analysis; and to monitor disease control measures
and infodemics. 

The WHO Hub will enable partners from around the world to collaborate and co-create the tools and data access that all countries need to prepare, detect and respond to pandemic and epidemic risks. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Federal Republic of Germany will establish a new global hub for pandemic and epidemic intelligence, data, surveillance and analytics innovation. The Hub, based in Berlin and working with partners around the
world, will lead innovations in data analytics across the largest network of global data to predict, prevent, detect prepare for and respond to pandemic and epidemic risks worldwide. 

Critically, the WHO Hub will support the work of public health experts and policy-makers in all countries with insights so
they can take rapid decisions to prevent and respond to future public health emergencies.“We need to identify pandemic and epidemic risks as quickly as possible, wherever they occur in the world. For that aim, we need to strengthen the global early warning surveillance system with improved collection of health-related data and inter-disciplinary risk analysis,” said Jens Spahn, German Minister of Health.

Working with partners globally, the WHO Hub will drive a scale-up in innovation for existing forecasting and early warning capacities in WHO and Member States.

At the same time, the WHO Hub will accelerate global collaborations across public and private sector organizations, academia, and international partner networks. It will help them to collaborate and co-create the necessary tools for managing and analyzing data for early warning surveillance. It will also promote greater access to data and information.

“One of the lessons of COVID-19 is that world needs a significant leap forward in data analysis to help leaders make informed public health decisions,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “This requires harnessing the potential of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, combining diverse data sources, and collaborating across multiple disciplines. Better data and better analytics will lead to better decisions.”

read the release at the WHO website at https://www.who.int/news/item/05-05-2021-who-germany-launch-new-global-hub-for-pandemic-and-epidemic-intelligence

also useful to read the note on the UN website about the same

https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/05/1091332

Several new viral respiratory tract infectious diseases with epidemic potential that threaten global health security have emerged in the past 15 years. In 2003, WHO issued a worldwide alert for an unknown emerging illness, later named severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The disease caused by a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV) rapidly spread worldwide, causing more than 8000 cases and 800 deaths in more than 30 countries with a substantial economic impact.

Since then, we have witnessed the emergence of several other viral respiratory pathogens including influenza viruses (avian influenza H5N1, H7N9, and H10N8; variant influenza A H3N2 virus), human adenovirus-14, and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

In response, various surveillance systems have been developed to monitor the emergence of respiratory-tract infections. These include systems based on identification of syndromes, web-based systems, systems that gather health data from health facilities (such as emergency departments and family doctors), and systems that rely on self-reporting by patients.

More effective national, regional, and international surveillance systems are required to enable rapid identification of emerging respiratory epidemics, diseases with epidemic potential, their specific microbial cause, origin, mode of acquisition, and transmission dynamics.

Communicable diseases including COVID-19 pose a major threat to public health worldwide.

To curb the spread of communicable diseases effectively, timely surveillance and prediction of the risk of pandemics are essential.

The aim of this study is to analyze free and publicly available data to construct useful travel data records for network statistics other than common descriptive statistics.

This study describes analytical findings of time-series plots and spatial-temporal maps to illustrate or visualize pandemic connectedness.

We observed similar patterns in the time-series plots of worldwide daily flights from January to early-March of 2019 and 2020. A sharp reduction in the number of daily flights recorded in mid-March 2020 was likely related to large-scale air travel restrictions owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. The levels of connectedness between places are strong indicators of the risk of a pandemic.

Since the initial reports of COVID-19 cases worldwide, a high network density and reciprocity in early-March 2020 served as early signals of the COVID-19 pandemic and were associated with the rapid increase in COVID-19 cases in mid-March 2020.

The spatial-temporal map of connectedness in Europe on March 13, 2020, shows the highest level of connectedness among European countries, which reflected severe outbreaks of COVID-19 in late March and early April of 2020.

The analysis can facilitate early recognition of the risk of a current communicable disease pandemic and newly emerging communicable diseases in the future.

read the study at https://publichealth.jmir.org/2021/3/e27317