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How can we improve and facilitate multi-sectoral collaboration in warning and response systems for infectious diseases and natural hazards to account for their drivers, interdependencies and cascading impacts?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2023

Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba Farini*
Affiliation:
Head of Health Warnings Research and Innovation at University College of London Warning Research Centre (UCL WRC) One Health Academic Policy Advisor at UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs Doctoral Researcher at Transforming UK Food Systems Centre for Doctoral Training
*
Author for correspondence: Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba Farini, Email: [email protected]
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Extract

Socio-economic, environmental and ecological factors have repeatedly been shown to drive emerging infectious disease risk. However, these factors remain largely excluded from surveillance, warning and response systems. Similarly, even though hazards’ impacts are vastly interconnected (e.g. climate change, flooding, droughts, tropical cyclones, heatwaves, water-borne and vector-borne diseases), warning systems tend to act and work in silos. The disconnect among sectors, disaster risk reduction and health preparedness leads to reactive systems that wait for a disaster to occur before issuing a response.

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Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - SA
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), which permits re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is used to distribute the re-used or adapted article and the original article is properly cited
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

Context

Socio-economic, environmental and ecological factors have repeatedly been shown to drive emerging infectious disease risk. However, these factors remain largely excluded from surveillance, warning and response systems. Similarly, even though hazards’ impacts are vastly interconnected (e.g. climate change, flooding, droughts, tropical cyclones, heatwaves, water-borne and vector-borne diseases), warning systems tend to act and work in silos. The disconnect among sectors, disaster risk reduction and health preparedness leads to reactive systems that wait for a disaster to occur before issuing a response.

This question invites researchers to:

  • explore the relationships between hazards (human-made, biological, natural, etc.)

  • consider how we can better account for and address drivers of disease risk

  • propose suggestions for how we can build multi-hazard, multi-sector warning and response systems that work across the various elements of disaster risk reduction, including prevention

This research is particularly relevant both for the negotiations of a new pandemic agreement, including a One Health component, and the United Nations 2022 Early Warnings for All initiative that aims to ensure that every person on Earth is protected by an early warning system in the next five years.

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Competing interests

The author declares none.