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A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. Widespread endemic diseases with a stable number of infected individuals such as recurrences of seasonal influenza are generally excluded as they occur simultaneously in large regions of the globe rather than being spread worldwide.
Biodefense refers to measures to counter biological threats, reduce biological risks, and prepare for, respond to, and recover from bioincidents, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate in origin and whether impacting human, animal, plant, or environmental health. Biodefense measures often aim to improve biosecurity or biosafety. Biodefense is frequently discussed in the context of biological warfare or bioterrorism, and is generally considered a military or emergency response term.
An epidemic is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of hosts in a given population within a short period of time. For example, in meningococcal infections, an attack rate in excess of 15 cases per 100,000 people for two consecutive weeks is considered an epidemic.
In epidemiology, an outbreak is a sudden increase in occurrences of a disease when cases are in excess of normal expectancy for the location or season. It may affect a small and localized group or impact upon thousands of people across an entire continent. The number of cases varies according to the disease-causing agent, and the size and type of previous and existing exposure to the agent. Outbreaks include many epidemics, which term is normally only for infectious diseases, as well as diseases with an environmental origin, such as a water or foodborne disease. They may affect a region in a country or a group of countries. Pandemics are near-global disease outbreaks when multiple and various countries around the Earth are soon infected.
The Nuclear Threat Initiative, generally referred to as NTI, is a non-profit organization located in Washington, D.C. The American foreign policy think tank was founded in 2001 by former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn and philanthropist Ted Turner and describes itself as a "nonprofit, nonpartisan global security organization focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats imperiling humanity."
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is an independent, nonprofit organization of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The center works to protect people's health from epidemics and pandemics and ensures that communities are resilient to major challenges. The center is also concerned with biological weapons and the biosecurity implications of emerging biotechnology.
Nathan Daniel Wolfe is an American virologist. He was the founder and director of Global Viral and the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University.
Global Viral (GV), previously known as Global Viral Forecasting Institute (GVFI), is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 2007 by Nathan Wolfe to study infectious diseases, their transmission between animals and humans, and the risk involved with their global spread. An original goal of the organization was to develop an early warning system for pandemics and at one point Global Viral coordinated a staff of over 100 scientists in China, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, DR Congo, Republic of the Congo, Laos, Gabon, Central African Republic, Malaysia, Madagascar and Sao Tome.
Disease X is a placeholder name that was adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in February 2018 on their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic. The WHO adopted the placeholder name to ensure that their planning was sufficiently flexible to adapt to an unknown pathogen. Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci stated that the concept of Disease X would encourage WHO projects to focus their research efforts on entire classes of viruses, instead of just individual strains, thus improving WHO capability to respond to unforeseen strains. In 2020, experts, including some of the WHO's own expert advisors, speculated that COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus strain, met the requirements to be the first Disease X.
The Global Health Security Index is an assessment of global health security capabilities in 195 countries prepared by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
Richard Hatchett is an American oncologist and epidemiologist who has been serving as chief executive officer of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) in Oslo and London since 2017. He was awarded the Secretary of Health and Human Services's Award for Distinguished Service.
Syra Madad is an American pathogen preparedness expert and infectious disease epidemiologist. Madad is the Senior Director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals where she is part of the executive leadership team which oversees New York City's response to the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the city's 11 public hospitals. She was featured in the Netflix documentary series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak and the Discovery Channel documentary The Vaccine: Conquering COVID.
Michael Joseph Ryan is an Irish epidemiologist and former trauma surgeon, specialising in infectious disease and public health. He is executive director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, leading the team responsible for the international containment and treatment of COVID-19. Ryan has held leadership positions and has worked on various outbreak response teams in the field to eradicate the spread of diseases including bacillary dysentery, cholera, Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, Marburg virus disease, measles, meningitis, relapsing fever, Rift Valley fever, SARS, and Shigellosis.
Pandemic prevention is the organization and management of preventive measures against pandemics. Those include measures to reduce causes of new infectious diseases and measures to prevent outbreaks and epidemics from becoming pandemics.
Caitlin M. Rivers is an American epidemiologist who as Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, specializing on improving epidemic preparedness. Rivers is currently working on the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on the incorporation of infectious disease modeling and forecasting into public health decision making.
Planning and preparing for pandemics has happened in countries and international organizations. The World Health Organization writes recommendations and guidelines, though there is no sustained mechanism to review countries' preparedness for epidemics and their rapid response abilities. National action depends on national governments. In 2005–2006, before the 2009 swine flu pandemic and during the decade following it, the governments in the United States, France, UK, and others managed strategic health equipment stocks, but they often reduced stocks after the 2009 pandemic in order to reduce costs.
The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board is a joint arm of the WHO and the World Bank. It was created by both organizations in response to the Western African Ebola virus epidemic.
The Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, or the Global Collaboration to Accelerate the Development, Production and Equitable Access to New COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, is a G20 initiative announced by pro-tem Chair Mohammed al-Jadaan on 24 April 2020. A call to action was published simultaneously by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 24 April. As of January 2022, it was the largest international effort to achieve equitable access to COVID-19 health technologies.
Vittoria Colizza is an Italian scientist, research director at INSERM and a specialist in mathematical modeling of infectious disease and computational epidemiology. In particular, she has carried out research on the modeling of seasonal and pandemic flu, Ebola and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Metabiota is a San Francisco startup that compiles data from around the world to predict disease outbreaks. The company is a partner with USAID's PREDICT and PREVENT programs. In the early months of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, Metabiota and BlueDot independently demonstrated the capabilities of computer analytics to map the future spread of the virus between countries.
References
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- ↑ Bakshi, Akanksha (19 August 2022). "Cathie Wood Favorite Ginkgo Bioworks Bolsters Biosecurity Platform Via This Acquisition". Yahoo News. Retrieved 28 February 2023.
- ↑ "Nita Madhav | DCP3". dcp-3.org. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
- ↑ "We Can Protect the Economy From Pandemics. Why Didn't We?". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028 . Retrieved 2020-06-29.
- ↑ "Using Modern Data and Analytics To Confront the Challenge of Epidemic Risk". BRINK – News and Insights on Global Risk. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
- ↑ Oppenheim, Ben; Gallivan, Mark; Madhav, Nita K.; Brown, Naor; Serhiyenko, Volodymyr; Wolfe, Nathan D.; Ayscue, Patrick (2019-01-01). "Assessing global preparedness for the next pandemic: development and application of an Epidemic Preparedness Index". BMJ Global Health. 4 (1): e001157. doi: 10.1136/bmjgh-2018-001157 . ISSN 2059-7908. PMC 6352812 . PMID 30775006.
- ↑ Madhav, Nita; Oppenheim, Ben; Gallivan, Mark; Mulembakani, Prime; Rubin, Edward; Wolfe, Nathan (2017), Jamison, Dean T.; Gelband, Hellen; Horton, Susan; Jha, Prabhat (eds.), "Pandemics: Risks, Impacts, and Mitigation", Disease Control Priorities: Improving Health and Reducing Poverty (3rd ed.), Washington (DC): The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank, doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-0527-1_ch17, ISBN 978-1-4648-0527-1, PMID 30212163 , retrieved 2020-06-29
- ↑ GmbH, finanzen net. "Metabiota Appoints Distinguished Data Scientist and Disease Modeler as CEO | Markets Insider". markets.businessinsider.com. Retrieved 2020-06-29.
- ↑ "Data predicted coronavirus and where it may spread next". Marketplace. 2020-02-05. Retrieved 2020-06-29.