In Berlin, a new WHO center aims to keep an eye on emerging diseases

BERLIN—Germany and the World Health Organization (WHO) have teamed up to launch a new hub here that aims to accelerate efforts to detect and respond to new disease outbreaks. The German government pledged $100 million to stand up the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, which was formally inaugurated yesterday.

One goal is to bring together, in real time, information on emerging public health crises. But exactly how the new hub will operate is still under discussion, says director Chikwe Ihekweazu, a public health specialist who has led Nigeria’s Centre for Disease Control for the past 5 years. “I am actually very comfortable with the vagueness in the current ideas,” he says. “It does need a lot of initial brainstorming … then building up the consensus, the political will, and then mobilizing resources to invest in this area.”

At the moment, WHO identifies about 4500 potential public health risks a month, such as a suspected case of a dangerous pathogen or a cluster of unexplained illnesses, says Oliver Morgan, director of the organization’s Health Emergency Information and Risk Assessment Department. “We see something unusual happen and then we need to try and understand what the risk is,” he says. “Then, also try to understand how we should respond.”

To do that effectively, however, officials often need a wide range of information, including social and demographic data on communities where an outbreak is occurring, travel patterns, and how people interact with animals or the environment, Morgan says. And although “there’s quite a lot of information available, it’s actually quite hard to pull it together and understand what it all means. That’s really what the focus of the WHO hub will be.” Between 100 and 120 people should be working at the hub by the end of the first year, he says, including epidemiologists and data scientists, but also potentially social scientists.

Ideally, the hub will become the foundation of a new global surveillance architecture for COVID-19 and other pathogens, says Jeremy Farrar, who heads the Wellcome Trust. “This needs to become something akin to the global influenza network,” a collection of centers that track flu viruses. Farrar envisions additional hubs in Asia, Africa, and the Americas that would draw key information from smaller laboratories and data centers. “You can’t have intelligence if you don’t have the input of all the bits you need for intelligence,” he says.

The Berlin hub is the result of a fall 2020 conversation between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Its inauguration now is widely seen as a nod to Merkel, whose time as chancellor will end this fall after almost 16 years. (Tedros presented Merkel with a WHO Global Leadership Award at the inauguration ceremony.)

Some observers worry the hub’s hasty creation highlights a problematic trend. “We’re seeing a ‘hubization’ of the WHO,” says Maike Voss, a global health specialist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “Rich countries are buying new WHO institutions,” she says, pointing to the recent creation of a WHO biobank in Switzerland and a WHO academy in France. She fears the trend could “lead to a legitimacy problem [for WHO] over time.”

Still, Farrar says, “you can’t ask Europe to step up and then be too cynical when they step up.” And there is little question that the world needs to get better at addressing emerging disease threats, Ihekweazu says. “If this pandemic hasn’t woken us up to the need to do that, then nothing will.”

source: sciencemag.org