WHO, Germany open pandemic global hub for epidemic intelligence sharing

By Peter Kenny

GENEVA (AA) - A hub to provide global data, analytics, and decision for all health emergencies can be a contact point between Europe and other continents, especially Africa, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday.

Merkel and World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus inaugurated a new WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence based in Berlin.

“We have to realize that the World Health Organization can only be as good as the member states allow it to be by handing or transferring responsibility,” said the German chancellor.

“That is, of course, nothing that the director-general can heal or change. But we need who we need the WHO and its global structures, not only when it comes to pandemics.”

Merkel said Germans “take some pride” in that the first PCR test for COVID-19 was developed at the institute housing the hub.

Tedros praised Merkel for her role in establishing the hub and said: “The world needs to be able to detect new events with pandemic potential and to monitor disease control measures on a real-time basis to create effective pandemic and epidemic risk management.

“This hub will be key to that effort, leveraging innovations in data science for public health surveillance and response, and creating systems whereby we can share and expand expertise in this area globally.”

- Nobody can do it alone

The WHO chief said: “No single institution or nation can do this alone.”

Germany has contributed an initial investment of $100 million and officials said data sharing is needed, urging China to "be fully cooperative."

It will harness broad and diverse partnerships across many professional disciplines and the latest technology to link the data, tools, and communities of practice to share data and intelligence for the common good.

The hub is part of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, having the collaboration of countries and partners worldwide, driving innovations to increase the availability of critical data, developing state-of-the-art analytic tools and predictive models.

These will be used for risk analytics and link communities of practice around the world.

The hub will support the work of public health experts and policymakers in all countries with the tools needed to forecast, detect, and assess epidemic and pandemic risks so they can make rapid decisions to prevent and respond to future public health emergencies.

“Despite decades of investment, COVID-19 has revealed the great gaps that exist in the world’s ability to forecast, detect, assess and respond to outbreaks that threaten people worldwide,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, the head of the WHO’s Health Emergency Program.

“The WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence is designed to develop data access, analytic tools and communities of practice to fill these very gaps, promote collaboration and sharing, and protect the world from such crises in the future.”

Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, currently the director-general of the Nigeria Center for Disease Control, will lead the WHO hub.

The WHO hub is operating from a center provided by the Charite-Universitatsmedizin Berlin.

It will soon move to a permanent campus at the heart of Berlin in Kreuzberg that will provide a collaborative work environment for the hub’s staff from a wide range of disciplines.