Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation www.gatesfoundation.org recently announced funding for $75 million to develop a new global health surveillance network to help prevent childhood mortality in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The network is expected to be a twenty year project initially at six sites, but eventually may be expanded to as many as 20 sites.
“Seven million children die from preventable causes annually around the world,” reports Jeffrey Koplan, MD, Vice President for Global Health at Emory University. “Many of these deaths from pneumonia, meningitis, malaria, tuberculosis, respiratory syncytial virus infections, poor nutrition, and accidents could be prevented with better vaccines, antibiotics, diagnostics, advanced medical procedures, improved nutrition, behavior modification, and access to care.”
The surveillance network is expected to help the Gates Foundation and other stakeholders to quickly generate the data needed to develop targeted prevention, diagnosis, and treatment for children in developing countries.
The Emory Global Health Institute www.globalhealth.emory.edu which houses the International Association of National Public Health Institutes (IANPHI) www.ianphi.org will be the lead partner in the new network.
IANPHI is a global network of CDC-like organizations that has established a robust health infrastructure in many developing nations and relationships among governments, healthcare institutions, and global organizations.
CDC will provide technical advice on the selection, development, and oversight of what is being referred to as the “Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance” network or CHAMPS. As the disease surveillance system is established, this system and other aspects related to prevention and clinical care will be gradually transferred to local governments and national public health institutes with the help of IANPHI.
CHAMPS will produce better data, faster and give information on where and why children are getting sick and dying. CHAMPS will partner with governments and national public health institutes to better diagnose, characterize, manage, treat, and prevent specific causes of disease.
In the long term, disease surveillance sites in areas of high childhood mortality rates will offer a long-term approach to information management, laboratory infrastructure, and workforce capacity. The goal for the future is to provide data that will impact policies, set priorities for research, and provide needed medicines and vaccines where needed. The network could also be repurposed quickly in the event of an emerging disease epidemic, such as Ebola.