Gates Package — page 935

Chapter 3 Get better at detecting outbreaks early How many times have you been sick in your life? Most people have probably suffered through a number of colds and stomach bugs, and if you're unlucky, you may have caught something worse like the flu, measles, or COVID. Depending on where you live in the world, you may have dealt with malaria or cholera. People get sick all the time, but not every illness leads to an outbreak. The task of watching for the cases that are merely troublesome, the ones that could be catastrophic, and everything in between--and ringing the alarm bell when necessary--is known as epidemic disease surveillance. The people who do disease surveillance aren't looking for a needle in a haystack; they're looking for the sharpest, deadliest needles in a mountain of somewhat duller ones. The term "surveillance" has an unfortunate Orwellian connotation, but in this sense it just refers to the formal and informal networks of people around the world who keep track of what's happening with health day to day. The information they provide does everything from shaping public policy to informing which strain of flu you'll be vaccinated against each year. And as COVID has made clear, the world woefully underinvests in disease surveillance. Without a stronger system, we won't see potential pandemics soon enough to prevent them. Fortunately, this is a solvable problem, and in the rest of this chapter I'll explain how we can solve it. I'll start with the local health care workers, epidemiologists, and public health