The Covid pandemic made clear how important pathogen genetics is for combating pandemic risks.
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Saturday unveiled a new worldwide network that will improve routine disease surveillance and assist detect and address disease threats before they become epidemic or pandemic.
The International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN) will offer a platform for connecting nations and regions, enhancing methods for gathering and analyzing sample data, and disseminating that information more widely.
Pathogen genomics examines the genetic material of viruses, bacteria, and other disease-causing organisms to learn more about how contagious, lethal, and contagious they are.
In order to avoid outbreaks and respond to them as part of a larger disease surveillance system, scientists and public health officials can discover and track diseases with the help of this information.
According to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “the goal of this new network is ambitious, but it can also play a crucial role in health security: to give every country access to pathogen genomic sequencing and analytics as part of its public health system.”
He continued, “The world is stronger when it stands together to confront shared health dangers, as was so amply proved to us during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Covid pandemic made clear how important pathogen genetics is for combating pandemic risks. The SARS-CoV-2 genome was promptly sequenced, which allowed vaccinations to be developed and distributed more quickly.
The discovery of new, more contagious virus varieties would not have happened as swiftly. Effective preparedness and response for epidemics and pandemics, as well as ongoing surveillance of a wide range of diseases, from foodborne illnesses and influenza to tuberculosis and HIV, all depend on genomics.
Antiretroviral regimens that have saved countless lives have resulted from its usage, for instance, in tracking the spread of HIV drug resistance.
Due to the Covid epidemic, countries’ genomics capacities have recently been scaled up, but many still lack efficient mechanisms for gathering and analyzing samples or applying those data to guide public health decision-making.
In order to create a collaborative system to better identify, prevent, and respond to disease risks, the IPSN will address these difficulties through a worldwide network that connects geographic regions and disease-specific networks.