The World Health Organization (WHO) initiated a worldwide community this weekend to promptly establish the hazard posed by contagious ailments, equivalent to COVID-19, and disseminate data to mitigate their transmission.
The International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN) will present a platform for connecting international locations and areas, bettering programs for accumulating and analyzing samples, the company stated.
The community goals to assist guarantee infectious illness threats are swiftly recognized and tracked and the knowledge shared and acted on to stop catastrophes just like the COVID-19 pandemic.
The community will depend on pathogen genomics to research the genetic code of viruses, micro organism and different disease-causing organisms to grasp how infectious and lethal they’re and the way they unfold.
The knowledge gathered will feed right into a broader illness surveillance system to establish and monitor ailments to comprise outbreaks and develop remedies and vaccines.
‘Ambitious’ objectives
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed the “ambitious” objectives of the brand new community, saying it may “play a vital role in health security.”
“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,” he stated.
The IPSN, introduced a day earlier than the annual assembly of WHO member states begins in Geneva, may have a secretariat throughout the WHO’s Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence.
It is the newest of a number of initiatives launched since COVID-19 unfold that goals to bolster the world’s capacity to stop and extra successfully reply to pandemic threats.
The community will deliver collectively genomics and knowledge analytics specialists drawn from governments, academia, the personal sector and elsewhere.
“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 company stated.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the vital function pathogen genomics performs when responding to pandemic threats, with the WHO noting that with out the fast sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, vaccines wouldn’t have been as efficient and wouldn’t have grow to be accessible as rapidly.
New and extra transmissible virus variants wouldn’t have been recognized as rapidly.
“Genomics lies at the heart of effective epidemic and pandemic preparedness and response,” the company stated, including that it was additionally important for surveillance of varied ailments, from influenza to HIV.
While the pandemic spurred international locations to scale up their genomics capability, the company warned that many nonetheless lack efficient programs for accumulating and analyzing samples.
The IPSN would assist tackle such challenges, Tedros stated, because it may “give every country access to pathogen genomic sequencing and analytics as part of its public health system.”
Source: www.dailysabah.com
