WHO Early Warning Center: How Berlin is becoming the global headquarters for fighting pandemics

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Charité University Hospital in Berlin

Photo: Jürgen Ritter / imago images / Jürgen Ritter

This pandemic has preoccupied the world for more than a year and a half.

It's not over yet.

But experts already agree that a new one will come at some point.

And that the world needs better answers in order to recognize such global threats more quickly and to combat them in a more targeted manner.

The World Health Organization (WHO) also wants to monitor viruses that could become dangerous more closely in the future.

A new pandemic early warning center in Berlin, which will open this Wednesday, will play an important role in this, the so-called Global Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence.

This is where information from all over the world is supposed to come together in order to detect viral threats at an early stage.

Then governments could impose measures in good time and make recommendations on behavior or travel, for example.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, Health Minister Jens Spahn (both CDU) and WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus will attend the opening.

The hope of health experts is that if there is a threat from another disease, action will be taken earlier and more consistently than after the outbreak of the corona pandemic at the beginning of last year.

"An essential basis for the fight against future pandemics is data," said Chancellor Merkel in May when the decision was made for this center.

"Data that, if bundled and processed with the right analysis tools, provides insights that we could never discover on our own, or at least not that quickly."

The center is to use artificial intelligence to analyze vast amounts of such data.

These include animal health, unusual human diseases, the effects of climate change or population shifts.

Models should help to better assess possible risks.

Databases are already working

Scientists have long been calling for global efforts to better monitor animal diseases, known as zoonoses, that are dangerous for humans, for example.

As recently as April, researchers published Spillover.Global, a freely accessible database that is supposed to classify the risk of transmissions.

The transfer of such pathogens from animals to humans is known as spillover; to date, more than 250 zoonotic pathogens are known.

However, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of animal viruses have the potential to spread to humans.

The federal government has made 30 million euros available for the center in Berlin. Among other things, the expertise of the Robert Koch Institute, the Berlin Charité, one of the largest university hospitals in Europe, and the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering will be incorporated. So far, in addition to the WHO, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) have collected similar data. The center also needs supplies from governments, laboratories and scientific institutes.

The WHO investigation into the origin of the coronavirus does not generally cast a good light on the willingness to cooperate.

China withheld important data about the first known corona patients from the WHO team during its visit to Beijing, which was delayed for months.

The reason given was the privacy protection of the patient, although such data can be processed completely anonymously.

joe / dpa