The World Health Organization launches a global network to detect and prevent infectious disease threats

ROME – L’World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners are launching a global network to help protect people from infectious disease threats. L’International Pathogen Surveillance Network it will provide a platform to connect countries and regions, improve systems for collecting and analyzing virus samples, use this data to guide public health decision-making, and share that information as widely as possible.

How the network works. By constantly monitoring for pathogens, the network analyzes the genetic code of viruses, bacteria and other disease-causing organisms to understand how infectious they are, how deadly they are and how they spread. Once this information is gathered, scientists and public health officials can identify and monitor the development of a disease to prevent and respond to epidemics and develop treatments and vaccines for it.

All united against the development of diseases. L’International Pathogen Surveillance Network it brings together experts from around the world in genomics and data analysis from different fields. All share a common goal: to detect and respond to disease threats before they become epidemics and pandemics, and to optimize disease surveillance. The goal of this new network is ambitious, but it can play a crucial role in health security: to give every country access to sequencing and analysis of the genome of pathogens as an integral part of their health policy strategies. “As the recent experience of Covid-19 has taught us, the world is strongest when it unites to fight both single and shared threats,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of theWorld Health Organization.

The lesson of Covid-19. The recent pandemic has highlighted the critical role that pathogen genomics plays in responding to viral threats. Without rapid sequencing of the SARS-COV-2 genome, vaccines would not have been as effective or made available as quickly. Likewise, new variants of the virus would not have been identified so soon. Genomics is at the heart of effective epidemic and pandemic preparedness and response policy, as well as an integral part of the surveillance process for a wide range of diseases, from food-borne diseases to tuberculosis and HIV. Its use in monitoring the spread of HIV drug resistance, for example, has led to the creation of antiretroviral drugs that have saved many lives.

gaps to be filled. Despite the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries still lack effective systems for collecting and analyzing samples, nor are they able to use such data to make public health decisions. There is not enough sharing of data and best practices to build a robust global health surveillance network. Also from a financial point of view, the funds, which increased during the pandemic, are now being drastically reduced again, even in the richest countries. Yet viruses have no borders: if an epidemic explodes in one place in the world, it takes very little time to spread elsewhere. L’International Pathogen Surveillance Network intends to face these challenges by creating a global network, connecting geographical areas and different and distant realities to build a system based on collaboration that detects, prevents and responds as extensively and as quickly as possible to the threats of infectious diseases.