Key alert system for disease outbreaks is in crisis — can it be saved?

ProMED provides an early warning system for outbreaks of diseases such as Ebola. Here, a member of an emergency response team in Uganda looks for the contacts of people with Ebola during an outbreak in 2022.Credit: Luke Dray/Getty

Last week, nearly two-thirds of staff members who send out infectious-disease alerts for ProMED — an e-mail system responsible for sounding the alarm on outbreaks such as COVID-19 and Ebola — went on strike, leaving the future of the 29-year-old programme in limbo.

When announcing their strike in a 3 August e-mail to ProMED users, staff members called for more resources, transparency and independence from the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID), the non-profit organization in Brookline, Massachusetts, that operates ProMED. They are now looking to another entity — such as a university or a university consortium — to take over or share the service with ISID.

The disruption to ProMED has rattled the infectious-disease and public-health communities, which say that robust disease-surveillance systems are essential, because global warming increases the likelihood of more-frequent outbreaks. ProMED is “part of the fabric for how we identify emerging infectious diseases”, says John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “Without it, we’ll have a real gap to find the next pandemic

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Categorized as Virology

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