Governments around the world may use the monkeypox outbreak to establish and expand their medical surveillance systems.
Organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF) are calling on governments around the world to do more to prevent future pandemics by supposedly expanding their ability to predict, detect and prevent diseases. This is meant to be done through an expansion of global surveillance networks.
Writing for the WEF’s website, British health charity Wellcome Trust Director Dr. Jeremy Farrar argued that there are already surveillance networks for many diseases and it would be simple to expand these existing networks to cover other diseases.
“The Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System already manages the surveillance of new strains of influenza. The Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System similarly collects national data on AMR for selected priority pathogens,” wrote Farrar.
He also used examples from the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic of surveillance systems supposedly being able to deal with new outbreaks and the emergence of new variants.
Farrar further proposed that local and country-level surveillance systems be joined together with other collaborative public health organizations. The data these different agencies have will be shared and collated under a global health platform like the World Health Organization‘s Surveillance Hub in Berlin “to ensure rapid, open and trusted access to reliable information.” (Related: WHO partners with German telecom company to create global COVID-19 vaccine passport app.)
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