The World Health Organization launched an international surveillance network on Saturday May 20 to quickly detect threats posed by emerging infectious diseases such as Covid-19, and share information in order to prevent pandemics. The International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN) will provide a platform linking countries and regions to improve sample collection and testing systems, WHO said.
The network should facilitate the rapid identification and traceability of communicable diseases, as well as the sharing of information and the measures to be taken in order to prevent health disasters such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It will be based on genomics, which consists of sequencing the genome of viruses, bacteria and other pathogenic agents and studying their functioning in order to determine their contagiousness, their dangerousness and their mode of diffusion. The data collected will feed into a broader surveillance system aimed at identifying infectious diseases in order to intervene to prevent their spread and to develop treatments and vaccines.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the new device as “ambitious”, stressing that it could play “a vital role for security in the field of health”. “As has been demonstrated so vividly during the Covid-19 pandemic, the world is stronger when united to fight common health threats,” he said.
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The new network, whose launch comes on the eve of the World Health Assembly which brings together WHO member countries in Geneva each year, will have a secretariat within the WHO center “Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence”, a platform dedicated to collecting intelligence on pandemics and epidemics. It will connect experts from around the world in genetics and data analysis, from the public, academic and private sectors. “All share a common goal: to detect and respond to disease threats before they become epidemics and pandemics and to optimize routine disease surveillance,” the WHO said.
The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of studying the genome of viruses to combat the diseases they cause. Without the rapid sequencing of the genome of SARS CoV-2, the virus responsible for Covid-19 disease 19, the vaccines could not have been developed so quickly and been so effective, notes the WHO. The new variants of the virus, even more contagious, could not have been identified so quickly. “Genomics is at the heart of effective preparedness and response to epidemics and pandemics,” the WHO stressed, noting that genetic analysis of pathogens was as crucial for the control of many diseases as it was. whether it’s the flu or AIDS.
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While the Covid-19 pandemic has prompted countries to improve their genome sequencing capacities, others still lack the means to collect and analyze samples, the WHO said. The new global network is set to address these kinds of challenges, as it should “give all countries access to pathogen genome sequencing and analysis as part of their public health system,” according to Tedros.
