Global.health: data science and sharing for early response to emerging infectious diseases

Infectious diseases pose a grave threat to humanity due to factors such as increased travel, deforestation, and population growth. To address this challenge, Global.health aims to enhance the response to infectious diseases by creating an integrated platform that provides real-time access to clinical, epidemiological, genomic, and contextual data. This platform will train predictive models to effectively respond to current and future disease threats and promote equitable partnerships to improve data sharing and strengthen data science capacity in low- and middle-income countries. The project has four main goals: 1) developing rapid data dissemination pipelines and integrating them with the World Health Organization (WHO) for early international coordination and response; 2) building data integration pipelines and predictive models for climate-driven disease outbreaks in vulnerable regions; 3) developing tools to detect and correct biases in infectious disease data, improve data quality, and enable privacy-preserving distributed analytics; and 4) increasing adoption of Global.health's technology stack by engaging with WHO teams, regional offices, member states, partner organizations, and the research community. By achieving these aims, Global.health will significantly enhance the infectious disease data ecosystem, assess the value of integrating different data types during outbreaks, and create adaptable open-source tools applicable beyond infectious diseases.