Influenza, MERS, Ebola — the most frequently reported disease outbreaks

Globally, influenza has caused more outbreaks than any other infectious disease over the past 23 years, followed by Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Ebola.¹The study also reveals the subjective ways in which disease outbreaks are often reported, suggesting that this may influence how resources are allocated.

Public health officials use several data sources to track infectious disease outbreaks, but WHO’s Disease Outbreak News (DON) is one of the most influential. Rebecca Katz, a global health researcher at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and her colleagues collected all of her 2,789 DON reports published between 1996 and her 2019 into a searchable database. bottom. The database contains metadata obtained from each report, such as location of outbreak, disease type, and time frame of progression.

Researchers found that influenza, especially the H5N1 variant, was the most frequently reported of all infectious diseases in most years. Since 1996, 776 outbreaks have been documented.

China reported the most outbreaks, with a total of 262, of which 218 were influenza. This was followed by Saudi Arabia, where he recorded 179 MERS, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he reported 105 Ebola outbreaks (see Disease outbreaks). There were few reports related to Eastern European countries.

Katz said the diversity in reporting patterns stems from different surveillance capacities in different countries, in addition to diseases prioritized by national health authorities and, ultimately, what WHO decides to engage with. increase. “There are a lot of humans involved here, and humans calling out different things,” she says. For example, Ebola is reported far more frequently than other hemorrhagic fevers that occur regularly in Africa.

Other variations can be explained by the quality of a country’s healthcare system. For example, in Egypt, in his 23 years analyzed by Katz’s team, he had 115 reported outbreaks, most of them influenza. However, no outbreaks have been reported in nearby Libya, which has an underfunded and unstable health care system as a result of two civil wars during that period. Timothy, an infectious disease researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles Brewer said the analysis also shows that the WHO cannot track every outbreak worldwide and will have to pick and choose.

transparent reporting system

The team’s searchable database provides validated information about large outbreaks and could be a useful tool for documenting the history of infectious diseases, says the San Francisco, Calif., nonprofit Ending. said Mark Smolinski, president of Pandemics. Having a transparent and complementary outbreak reporting system is an important goal, he added. “The sooner we discover that there is a real threat somewhere in the world and make that information available, the better off we are all.”

This database allows researchers to determine the factors that determine how much money was spent to curb specific outbreaks, or how external conditions such as conflicts or weather events affect them. We can look into it, Katz says.

Katz wants to be more transparent about how WHO prioritizes the thousands of notifications it receives, develop more specific criteria for including outbreaks, and provide information on contextual factors such as climate hazards and outbreaks in animal populations. The additions said WHO could improve the DON report.

A WHO spokesperson said it was drafting a publication detailing the decision-making process and criteria for the DON report, as well as restructuring its website to make the report easier to find. The agency adds that in 2021 he has standardized the structure and format of DON reports. “WHO is a learning organization and this extends to DON,” the WHO wrote in a statement.