The Challenges and Opportunities in Creating an Early Warning System for Global Pandemics
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The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that global health, social systems, and economies can be surprisingly fragile in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. Yet, during the last half of 2022, and quite remarkably, we began dismantling essential infectious disease monitoring programs in several countries. Absent such programs, localized biological risks will transform into global shocks linked directly to our lack of foresight regarding emerging health risks. Additionally, recent studies indicate that more than half of all infectious diseases could be made worse by climate change, complicating pandemic containment. Despite this complexity, the factors leading to pandemics are largely predictable but can only be realized through a well-designed global early warning system. Such a system should integrate data from genomics, climate and environment, social dynamics, and healthcare infrastructure. The glue for such a system is community-driven modeling, a modern logistics of data, and democratization of AI tools. Using the example of dengue fever in Brazil, we can demonstrate how thoughtfully designed technology platforms can build global-scale precision disease detection and response systems that significantly reduce exposure to systemic shocks, accelerate science-informed public health policies, and deliver reliable healthcare and economic opportunities as an intrinsic part of the global sustainable development agenda.
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