The Rockefeller Foundation will provide $3 million in new funding for Global.health (G.h) – an open-source platform for scientific pandemic data.
The investment will allow the platform to expand its international partnerships and modernise the global effort around coordinated pandemic prevention, surveillance, and response.
Co-developed by researchers and engineers at the Department of Biology, University of Oxford and Boston Children’s Hospital, USA, Global.health enables access to real-time, anonymised health data on infectious disease outbreaks, for the first time.
The G.h database already holds over 100 million detailed, verified, harmonised, and de-identified SARS-CoV-2 case records from more than 130 countries: the most comprehensive repository of Covid-19 data in the world.
Dr Moritz Kraemer, Co-Founder of Global.health and Associate Professor at the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, commented: “Global.health’s mission is to organise the world’s infectious disease data to enable more rapid responses to them. So far, we have been focused on the initial phase of disease outbreaks, such as Covid-19 and monkeypox, and we will now be able to broaden our international partnerships and build our analytical tools to improve wider outbreak detection and response.”
The information will be a vital resource for epidemiologists and public health leaders to model and mitigate the spread of emerging infectious diseases.
Chikwe Ihekweazu, Assistant Director General of the World Health Organization, added: “I welcome The Rockefeller Foundation’s support expanding the reach and impact of Global.health, including the ongoing collaboration with WHO’s Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, to allow for faster data-driven decision-making at the earliest signs of an outbreak – when it matters most.”
