WHO UNVEILS GLOBAL NETWORK FOR EARLY DETECTION OF INFECTIOUS DISEASE THREATS

In order to quickly identify the threat posed by infectious diseases like COVID-19 and share knowledge to stop their spread, the World Health Organisation on Saturday launched a global network.

According to the organisation, the International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN) will offer a platform for connecting nations and regions and enhancing systems for gathering and analysing samples.

In order to prevent tragedies like the COVID pandemic, the network aims to ensure that infectious disease threats are quickly tracked, identified, and shared. Pathogen genomics will be used by the network to examine the genetic makeup of bacteria, viruses, and other disease-causing organisms in order to comprehend how contagious and lethal they are as well as how they spread.

In an effort to control outbreaks and create treatments and vaccines, the collected data will be incorporated into a larger disease surveillance system that is used to identify and track diseases.

The head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, praised the new network's "ambitious" objectives and predicted that it could "play a crucial role in health security." He further said, "As was so clearly demonstrated to us during the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is stronger when it stands together to fight shared health threats".

The IPSN will have a secretariat within the WHO's Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, which was announced the day before the annual meeting of WHO member states begins in Geneva. It is the most recent of several initiatives that have been started since COVID to improve the ability of the entire world to prevent pandemic threats and respond to them more successfully. The network will bring together experts in genomics and data analytics from the public and private sectors as well as from academia and other sources.

The agency asserted that "genomics lies at the heart of effective epidemic and pandemic preparedness and response," and that it was also crucial for the surveillance of a variety of diseases, from HIV to influenza.

Although the pandemic encouraged nations to expand their genomics capabilities, the agency warned that many still do not have efficient systems for gathering and analysing samples. According to Tedros, the IPSN could "provide every country access to pathogen genomic sequencing and analytics as part of its public health system," helping to address these issues.