How Existing Disease Surveillance Networks Can Catch New Outbreaks | Before the Outbreak, Episode 2

Many of our best surveillance tools today that were originally built to target specific diseases like polio and malaria have become critical infrastructure for outbreak response and early warning across a wide range of pathogens. This includes laboratory networks, diagnostic tools, and community health workers—all of which play vital roles in broader outbreak preparedness.

In today's episode, two experts who have helped create platforms to monitor and respond to specific diseases explain how those systems have been leveraged to detect and respond to outbreaks of all kinds. Hamid Jafari served as Director of Polio Eradication for the World Health Organization's Eastern Mediterranean Region, and Krystal Burungi Mwesiga is an entomologist at the Uganda Virus Research Institute, where she works as a research and outreach associate with the Target Malaria, a not-for-profit research consortium.

We kick off by discussing how these disease-specific surveillance platforms work, then broaden the conversation to how they've been adapted to respond to other outbreaks—and what can be done to make these tools even stronger.

This episode is produced in partnership with the United Nations Foundation as part of a series called "Before the Outbreak" that examines the role of disease surveillance in stopping the next pandemic.