Latest from the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence
Issue 5: As 2022 draws to a close
November and December have been busy months for the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. High-profile events included the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) Global Technical Meeting in Luxor, Egypt, involving more than 250 public health intelligence professionals; the third session of the Pandemic Hub’s Speaker Series; and the Paris Peace Forum, where EIOS was showcased—to name just a few. Read on for more on these and other highlights.
The Hub welcomed a number of visitors, including:
Professor Tulio de Oliveira and Dr Sikhulile Moyo, who were in Berlin to receive the German Africa Award 2022 for their role in the discovery of the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant in November 2021. They visited the Hub to discuss possible areas of collaboration, including the International Pathogen Surveillance Network, a global network of actors working in genomic surveillance, which brings together organizations and initiatives across continents and disease areas to create a locus for driving innovation and accelerating support for countries.
Natalie Toms, Counsellor for Global and Economics Issues at the UK Embassy in Berlin, and a delegation from the Dutch Ministry of Health and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment visited the Hub to hear about the work being done and to discuss possible areas of collaboration.
KEY EVENTS ATTENDED BY DR CHIKWE IHEKWEAZU
Biennial West-African Policy Dialogue on Pandemic Preparedness
On 1 December, Dr Ihekweazu delivered a keynote address at the Biennial West-African Policy Dialogue on Pandemic Preparedness hosted by the newly established German-West African Centre.
International Conference on Public Health in Africa 2022
From December 11-14, Dr Ihekweazu attended the International Conference on Public Health in Africa 2022 in Kigali, Rwanda, where he met with representatives of national public health institutes to discuss "Preparedness for future Pandemics and Post-Pandemic Recovery: Africa at a Crossroad", and delivered a talk on "The COVID-19 Pandemic – Lessons Learned for Future Health Threats, Prevention, Preparedness, and Response". He also met with experts and colleagues, including Chris Elias, President of the Global Development Division and Member of the Governing Board, representing Non-Sovereign Contributors for the Pandemic Fund; Cheikh Oumar Seydi, the Regional Director for Africa for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; UNICEF Regional Director Mohamed Fall; and Dr Ahmed Ogwell, the Director of Africa CDC, among others.
BMZ Digital Policy
Dr Ihekweazu attended the kick-off event for the strategic reorientation of the digital policy of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
2022 EIOS Global Technical Meeting: Celebrating 5 years of EIOS and exploring complexities in Public Health Intelligence
This year’s EIOS Global Technical Meeting (GTM) was special in many ways: not only was it the first face-to-face meeting of the global community behind the initiative in more than three years, but it also coincided with the initiative’s 5th anniversary. Since its inception in 2017, the EIOS initiative, which is hosted at the WHO Pandemic Hub, has continued to become a truly global and ever-growing collaborative. To date, more than 60 communities—the majority of them Member States and public health institutions, as well as regional and international governmental/non-governmental organizations, plus networks working on rapid detection and response to health threats—have joined the EIOS Initiative.
The GTM was held from 27-29 November 2022 in Luxor, Egypt, and co-hosted by the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (EMRO). Around 170 participants, including specialists in the field of Public Health Intelligence (PHI), as well as multidisciplinary collaborators from technology, academia, and philanthropy from more than 60 WHO Member States, came together to share experiences, engage in workshops and panel discussions, and explore PHI topics.
Under the slogan “The dawn of a new era for Public Health Intelligence”, the focus of this year’s technical meeting was on the shifting PHI landscape and a renewed emphasis on trust, transparency, and technology, as new actors and ways of working emerge from the COVID experience. On the sidelines of the meeting, we also hosted the third installment of the Hub Speaker Series “Complexity of Pandemics,” which focused on how innovation and technologies can be leveraged in the field of PHI for better pandemic preparedness and response (see more below).
The concept of trust was explored from different angles, a theme that was woven throughout the three days. Through a series of panels, presentations, and workshops, participants looked at public health decision making and the role of the public and citizen engagement in this space, as well as how to leverage technology and innovations in the field of PHI to support both. Representatives from diverse communities presented how they use EIOS and how being part of the initiative supports their PHI activities, while the EIOS Core Team presented plans and priorities for the initiative in an open Questions and Answers panel.
More information, including the full agenda, presentations, and session recordings will soon be available on the EIOS website.
EIOS Community Webinar series: FAO and WHO Headquarters
The third edition of the EIOS Community Webinar series took place with experts from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and colleagues from WHO Headquarters. With more than 200 participants from nearly 60 countries, this session was a great success.
Mirko Bruni, an animal disease information expert at FAO, shared his team’s experience with FAO’s Global Early Warning System to detect signals on several priority diseases, as well as for emerging threats, which are then analyzed and validated in the Disease Intelligence daily routine. Ingrid Nezu, an epidemiologist at WHO Headquarters, provided an overview of different health events being monitored by the Acute Events Epidemiology team; these include COVID-19, mpox (monkeypox), the Ukraine conflict, and Sudan virus disease.
The EIOS Community Webinar series enables PHI professionals around the globe to exchange information and experience so that communities can learn from each other.
As you can see, participants joined us from all over the world!
EIOS at the 2022 Paris Peace Forum
The EIOS Initiative was selected as one of the projects showcased at the Paris Peace Forum, held 11-12 November. At the Forum, world leaders and heads of international organizations, civil society, the private sector, and thousands of individuals gathered to share ideas and build new forms of collective action. EIOS was part of the theme “Managing the fallout of the multicrisis on populations”. Delegates from the WHO Pandemic Hub’s EIOS Core Team joined the event in the Palais Brongniart, set up a booth to showcase EIOS and presented the EIOS Initiative to several high-level authorities, including the President of Switzerland. Read more about it here.
Workshop with Robert Koch Institute, new agreement with HERA, and progress on the Open Source Programme Office
The Hub’s Project Management Office led a workshop on 25 November for 40 project leads from the Robert Koch Institute’s Global Health Protection Programme, in preparation for 23 new projects set to be launched.
Teams worked together to achieve a common understanding of project management, essential concepts, methodology, and terminology. They outlined the importance of planning, cost estimations, roles, and responsibilities, as well as other project elements. Participants undertook practical group exercises and gamification to further develop and strengthen team dynamics.
On 6 December, the European Commission's Health Emergency and Preparedness Response Authority (HERA) and the Hub agreed to strengthen cooperation on countermeasures to prevent, prepare, detect, and rapidly respond to serious cross-border threats to health. This followed the presentation of the EU's Global Health Strategy and the agreement between the Commission and WHO to reinforce cooperation to tackle global health threats.
Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides said: “Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have learned how important it is for all key players to work together to be better prepared and ready to respond fast to health emergencies. Under the new Global Health Strategy, the EU will be working to support a new global health order to better tackle health threats head on. The cooperation between HERA and the WHO Hub will contribute to reinforcing global health security through a stronger EU and international engagement on medical countermeasures”.
HERA and the Hub will work together under the umbrella of reinforced cooperation with the European Health Union, such as the implementation of the regulation on serious cross-border health threats and the extended mandate of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. We will involve each other when developing work plans and research roadmaps, to better consider our respective agendas and the overall research and development of advanced medical countermeasures and related technologies.
The agreement between HERA and the Hub has been established through an Administrative Arrangement that is operational for five years. It will be part of the broader cooperation to combat health threats that the Commission and the WHO agreed to reinforce.
The newly established Open Source Programme Office based at the Hub is picking up momentum! We relaunched the WHO open source communication channel, which is a platform for open source practitioners from WHO, WHO partners, Member States, and others to engage, collaborate, and share on all things open source. The team has been hard at work developing guidelines for teams wanting to use open source for their projects, including a getting started guide, which gives a quick overview of the steps required.
Dusan Milovanovic presented at the keynote of the Open Source Summit Europe 2022 in Dublin, an event for open source developers, technologists, and community leaders. Don’t worry if you missed the live session; you can watch the recording.
In November, Samuel Mbuthia presented the keynote of GitHub Universe in San Francisco, an annual conference for the global open source community, bringing together more than 1000 developers and technologists. Samuel shared his reflections on open source and the early journey of the OSPO at WHO. Watch the session recording here.
Speaker Series
The third session of our quarterly, hybrid speaker series, Complexity of Pandemics, was a special edition, as it took place at this year’s Global Technical Meeting of the collaborative EIOS initiative, in Luxor, Egypt. The session was titled “Complexity of Pandemics N°3 – Leveraging Innovative Technologies”.
Together with the EIOS community, we discussed how innovative technologies—in the public health intelligence space and beyond—can be leveraged to embrace the complexity of pandemics for better pandemic preparedness and response.
Dr Ihekweazu set the scene, giving the Hub’s perspective on the topic, emphasizing the need to work towards a common innovation pathway for emerging technologies in the surveillance space. Our keynote speaker Professor Dirk Brockmann, biologist and computational epidemiologist from Humboldt University Berlin, introduced us to a complexity science perspective on pandemic intelligence. Afterwards, we heard comments from two public health practitioners on digital solutions applications in their daily work: Dr Nada Ghosn, who leads the Epidemiological Surveillance Programme at the Ministry of Health in Lebanon and Ms Kyeng Mercy Tetuh, who works in the Africa CDC to build capacities for Member States on event-based surveillance. The event was rounded off with a panel discussion facilitated by moderator Dr Philip Abdelmalik, Head of WHO’s Intelligence Innovation and Integration Unit. Watch the recording of this special edition below!
Please note that owing to technical difficulties, the livestream is of lower quality than usual.
The tentative dates for the next session of our speaker series, in a hybrid format, are 15 or 16 March 2023. This fourth session will be the first to take place at our premises at Moritzplatz, Prinzessinnenstraße 17/18, 10969 Berlin.
COMPLEXITY of PANDEMICS N°4 – Title and topic to be announced
Tentative dates: 15 or 16 March 2023, 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm (Central European Time)
USE THIS LINK FOR EARLY REGISTRATION
Visit the Pandemic Hub’s new website here.