Pandemic prevention may be within our grasp

Writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Dr Mark Smolinski discusses the need for multisector, concerted action, to halt the global spread of disease.

The current pandemic has shown that a One Health approach, combined with cross-border cooperation, participatory surveillance, and early detection are vital if we are to prevent another global health emergency on the scale of COVID-19.

PODD's work in Thailand - which won The Trinity Challenge's grand prize in June this year - has demonstrated that human intelligence and crowdsourced data have an important role to play in regions with limited laboratory capacity.

"The most successful initiatives rely on social innovation of both local ingenuity and cross-sector collaboration. Specifically, securing a pandemic-free future requires governments, academia, civil society, philanthropists, and the private sector to take five priority actions. When fully adopted, these measures will transform pandemic preparedness in the future," says Dr Smolinski.

Dr Mark Smolinksi is a medical epidemiologist and President of Ending Pandemics, a US nonprofit working to detect, verify, and contain outbreaks faster across the globe. His work focuses on supporting innovations in disease surveillance, training the next generation of epidemiologists, and supporting regional disease surveillance networks.

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