Publications

This is the first of a 2-part special feature that focuses on threat agnostic approaches for the early detection of naturally occurring or humanmade biological threats, which are critical for a robust biodefense and public health response.

The Practical playbook for addressing health misinformation provides guidance on ways public health and medical professionals can set themselves up for success, make decisions on when they need to act to address misinformation, choose which actions and approaches might be useful to their audiences and information needs, and evaluate how their efforts are working.

This report calls out the urgent need to strengthen and build resilience in primary care (PC) whilst building cross-sector collaboration between public health (PH) and community-based organizations (CBOs).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries often needed to divert their human, financial and material resources away from existing health programmes to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. There are numerous reports of global inequities in access to critical care and medical countermeasures exacerbated by the pandemic as a consequence of chronically underfunded and weakened public health systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly affected all mass gatherings for sporting and religious events, causing cancellation, postponement, or downsizing.

Paramyxoviridae is a large viral family that contains many once common and well-known human pathogens, such as measles and mumps, as well as other pathogens that pose concerns for their potential to cause epidemic or pandemic disease.¹

Integrated vaccine delivery – the linkage of routine vaccination with provision of other essential health services – is a hallmark of robust primary care systems that has been linked to equitable improvements in population health outcomes.

Language inequities in global health stem from colonial legacies, and global health security is no exception. The International Health Regulations (IHRs), a legally binding framework published by the WHO, lay the foundation for global health security and state the roles and responsibilities States Parties are compelled to follow to improve their capabilities to prevent, detect and respond to potential public health emergencies of international concern.

In response to growing reports of concerning/harassing messages and backlash related to public health work, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health established the FlagIt report and response system. The system uses a dedicated FlagIt email inbox for faculty and staff to report harassing or concerning messages related to public-facing work and has an autoreply message sharing available institutional resources.

Biomanufacturing practitioners and researchers describe the norms that should govern the growing, global field, to include safety, security, sustainability, and social responsibility. These ‘4S Principles’ should be broadly adopted so that the future of the field may provide the greatest benefits to society.

Among the approximately 2 dozen families of viruses that have the capacity to infect humans, roughly 25% of these families have pandemic potential (Figure 1). Specifically, this capacity is conferred by their ability to be transmitted via the respiratory route.¹ Devising response plans for each of these 6 viral families — Adenoviridae, Coronaviridae, Paramyxoviridae, Picornaviridae, Pneumoviridae, and Orthomyxoviridae — is essential for pandemic preparedness.

How we share in the work of caring for one another during a pandemic is a common thread in the papers comprising this special feature. The collection itself represents another round of retrospection and forward thinking about ways to improve upon readiness and response for a catastrophic health event now that we have lived through the COVID-19 pandemic.

A tool for cross-sectoral prioritization of zoonotic diseases, and mapping of systems for One Health coordination.

Mass-gathering events are a public health challenge and have the potential to amplify the transmission of infectious diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA)—a WHO Collaborating Centre for Global Health Security—developed a global database of mass gatherings, which we continue to maintain. The purpose of this database is to monitor the planning and execution of mass-gathering events and to document the uptake of WHO-recommended policies by organisers; for example, the use of a risk-based approach.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to this day, US state, tribal, local, and territorial health departments lacked comprehensive case investigation and contact tracing (CI/CT) guidelines that clearly define the capabilities and capacities of CI/CT programs and how to scale up these programs to respond to outbreaks. This research aims to identify the capabilities and capacities of CI/CT programs and to develop a conceptual framework that represents the relationships between these program components.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, including foundation models such as large language models (LLMs), are rapidly becoming more powerful, and governments and industry are racing to better understand the potential benefits and risks of this technology.

The COVID-19 pandemic, while unfortunately notable for immense strain and death throughout the world, has also shown great promise in the development of medical countermeasures. As the global scientific community shifted almost entirely towards vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics, new trial designs most significantly adaptive platform trials, began to be used with greater speed and broader reach. These designs allowed for deploying and investigating new therapeutics, repurposing currently existing therapeutics and flexibly removing or adding additional medications as data appeared in real-time. Moreover, public–private sector partnering occurred at a level not seen before, contributing greatly to the rapid development and deployment of vaccines.

Never before has the ability to rapidly detect and characterize any pathogen, be it known or novel, been so important to protecting global health. Pathogen agnostic tools, such as next-generation sequencing (NGS), enhance global biological defense and public health by addressing this exact need, but they must be deployed in a proactive manner to reach their full benefit. Using pathogen agnostic tools only during an outbreak is too retroactive and does not allow time for containment, particularly of a novel pathogen. In this commentary, we propose the development of national guidelines for a proactive, pathogen agnostic wastewater surveillance system in the United States with a focus on localities identified for risk of zoonoses and international ports of entry.