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The UK has a plan to get a new “Pandemic Radar” system

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Rivers and George’s proposal was read by the right people. Five days after the removal of President Joe Biden, the new administration committed Creation of a National Center for Epidemic Anticipation and Exit Analysis. In March, $ 500 million in funding was designated under the American Rescue Plan Act.

Here comes the US agency and the expected international effort: Their success will be based on data: more data, more data, just more. By the middle of the century, the accuracy of the weather forecast was not the end of nightly TV jokes. It became a reliable effort to deploy data collection devices — satellites, Doppler radar, weather balloons, automated surface observation systems — and to achieve the processing power and graphics systems of supercomputers to understand and represent results.

There are already data collection devices that can help us explore the horizon in search of a pandemic. Mobility data, purchase records, search terms, the words you use in tweets – all of which represent information that can drive predictive tools. Public health is still not doing a good job of accessing, collecting and analyzing this data. Ways to get there have not been worked out even in rich countries. In the Global South, the problem is worse.

“There’s a lot of heterogeneity in the capabilities that underlie different countries and places,” Rivers says. Obtaining this data to help a country sound the alarm, let alone help it with forecasts around the world, “could also be a transition from paper reports to digital reports,” he added. “It’s hard to see how to jump to the end and how to have an advanced radar system without resorting to those basic pieces, when every piece in every jurisdiction is a big business.”

Take test results, for example. It would be advisable to connect the results of diagnostic tests performed on health visits to find out if a wave of respiratory infections caused by a common virus or a new strain occurs. But so many people do not have access to health care where diagnostic data may have limited predictive power. On the other hand, most people use sanitation systems – where they are – and wastewater sampling can detect pathogens without entering into individual privacy or forcing the construction of interactive record systems.

Animal data it is another gap. There are already structures in place to report cases of human diseases and wildlife diseases, but they are separate, run by different United Nations agencies. Reports from one system have no alarm in another game, a surveillance, as many of the diseases that are emerging are zoonotic, starting in animals and jumping on humans.

This revelation, which was found in the old sugars in people’s throats, carried by the coronavirus carried by cats and dogs two weeks ago, proves this. It came to light late because of an academic project. No such reports have been reported through a notification system, and there is no indication that anything new has been established to monitor the virus. “We don’t have a system now that monitors dog coronaviruses,” says Carlson. “We know that it is a virus that can be recombined in a way that can be transmitted to humans. We have them see it does, in a very limited way. We know this is a potential threat to health security. But there is no global monitoring. ”

The last question a pandemic radar will have is: Who benefits? The colonial model of resource extraction — taking a commodity from the Global South, using it to benefit the Global North — has previously broken the surveillance of disease. In 2007, Indonesia was concerned about the spread of the H5N1 bird flu worldwide he stopped sending viruses collected at its borders to the WHO influenza surveillance network. Moe he scolded the nation, saying it was endangering the world. The Indonesian government then suffered more bird flu deaths than any other country.he replied that was the only possible lever against injustice. If rich countries use Indonesian viruses to develop a bird flu vaccine, Indonesia wanted cheap and guaranteed access to not compete to buy a product that would not exist without its help.

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