A sort of World Health Organization The “Pandemic Intelligence Center” launched by the Director-General of the United Nations Agency Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and German Chancellor Merkel on Wednesday in Berlin will work to help governments determine future epidemics early and strengthen surveillance of new Covid-19 strains.
The center will host scientists and policymakers from all over the world on a project-by-project basis, with the aim of making it easier for the government to compare emerging infectious diseases and to obtain information about travel patterns, trade routes, or agriculture Humans interact with animals.
The World Health Organization, which links the health policies of the 194 member states of the United Nations, issued the highest level of alert on the Covid-19 pandemic on January 30, 2020, but research since then has shown that the coronavirus may be at least one month earlier Spread around the world.
“Covid-19 highlights a problem,” said Oliver Morgan, director of the WHO Department of Health Emergencies Information and Risk Assessment. “Currently there are a lot of data and public information we are trying to understand.”
The WHO processes an average of 9 million pieces of information related to the pandemic or the development of an epidemic every month, and conducts more detailed investigations of approximately 300 incidents.
The WHO said that part of the problem is that although governments and non-governmental organizations are collecting more and more public health-related information, they rarely simplify databases for simple international comparisons.
Analysis tools are usually developed in isolation or on an ad hoc basis, and analysis is hindered by data format issues. Morgan said that this problem became particularly apparent when monitoring new variants of Covid-19.
“One of the problems we face is that current clinical samples are often out of touch with epidemiological information such as morbidity or hospitalization rates. Therefore, even if we do identify a variant, we don’t know whether it will change the rules of the game,” he said.
Epidemiological surveillance through genome sequencing—including deciphering the sequence of nucleotide molecules that clarify the genetic code of a particular virus—has proven valuable in monitoring polio and influenza strains.
However, although countries such as the United Kingdom and South Africa have expanded their genome sequencing capabilities in the past decade, global coverage is still incomplete.
“We currently do not have a unified view on the global development of Covid-19 variants, and there is no database that allows us to easily share information,” Morgan said. “We can only truly understand the overall situation through some countries with advanced laboratories.”
He said that improving global tracking of Covid-19 mutations through genome sequencing may be the new center’s top priority.
The center will be partially funded by the German government of US$100 million for the first three years and will initially operate in a space on Luisenstrasse in central Berlin, which is rented from the Charité University Hospital.
It will later move to the permanent campus at Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg. The center can accommodate up to 120 people, most of whom are not WHO staff but visiting scientists or policy makers.
