The World Health Organization launched an international surveillance network on Saturday to rapidly detect threats posed by emerging infectious diseases such as Covid-19 and share information to prevent pandemics.
The International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN) will provide a platform linking countries and regions to improve sample collection and analysis systems, the WHO said.
Identification and traceability
The network should facilitate the rapid identification and traceability of communicable diseases, as well as the exchange of information and the measures to be taken 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 pathogens and studying their functioning to determine their contagiousness, their danger and their mode of distribution.
The data collected will feed into a broader surveillance system aimed at identifying infectious diseases in order to intervene to prevent their spread and develop treatments and vaccines.
Connected experts from around the world
The director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described the new device as “ambitious” and stressed that it could play “a vital role in health security”.
“As has been so vividly demonstrated during the covid-19 pandemic, the world is strongest when it comes together to fight common health threats,” he said.
The new network, which is launched on the eve of the World Health Assembly that brings together WHO member countries in Geneva each year, will have a secretariat within the WHO 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.
“They 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.
Importance of sequencing
The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of studying the genome of viruses to combat the diseases for which they are responsible.
Without the rapid sequencing of the SARS CoV-2 genome, the virus responsible for the Covid-19 disease, vaccines could not have been developed so quickly and be so effective, the WHO says. New, even more contagious variants of the virus could not have been identified so quickly.
“Genomics is at the heart of effective preparation for and response to epidemics and pandemics,” the WHO said, stressing that the genetic analysis of pathogens was as crucial for the control of many diseases as the flu or AIDS.
While the covid-19 pandemic has prompted countries to improve their genome sequencing capabilities, others still lack the means to collect and analyze samples, the WHO said.
The new global network is called upon to meet these kinds of challenges, as it should “provide all countries with access to pathogen genome sequencing and analysis as part of their public health system,” according to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Source: BFM TV
