Infectious diseases study highlights inconsistent reporting and importance of the human factor

A new report has unified the WHO threat prevention model, after reviewing nearly 3,000 documents issued over the 23 years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic

Until now, no official pandemic model had been capable of recording the health alerts that are reported around the world on a daily basis, which sometimes number tens of thousands a day. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated a unifying process that had been underway for years but had yet to be fully developed. Now, a group of scientists has developed a database based on previously unreleased World Health Organization (WHO) Disease Outbreak News (DON) statistics, a system which allows any physician to report possible health threats from anywhere in the world. It also provides a detailed review of epidemic outbreaks over the last two decades, up to the months leading up to the global outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Among the information collated in the report, China stands out with the highest number of health alerts (262), most of which are related to different types of influenza. Katz notes the coincidence between the information collected and the accuracy with which epidemics have been recorded, since despite “lost protocols,” redundant information or problems with mismatching categories, there have been no “unreported” phantom pandemics.

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The Georgetown researchers reviewed 2,789 WHO disease outbreak news reports, recounting relevant information about unexpected epidemic outbreaks such as the 2014-2016 Ebola virus outbreaks in West Africa or the 2011 cholera outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In these can be read “high-level decision making that governs information sharing during public health emergencies,” the researchers explain in the paper. This is why the report concludes that more information transparency and the adoption of “standardized formats for sharing epidemiological metadata” would make the DON “more useful to researchers and policymakers.” Despite this, the report acknowledges a palpable improvement in the WHO health alert register due to the new normality imposed by the pandemic.

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