Infectious Diseases

Learn key facts about symptoms, how it spreads, who is at risk, and how it can be prevented.

Introduction In just two decades, the world has faced a relentless barrage of deadly infectious disease outbreaks— SARS in 2002, H1N1 in 2009, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2016, and COVID-19 in 2020. Each crisis has cost lives, destabilized economies, and exposed vulnerabilities in global health systems. The COVID-19 pandemic alone resulted in over 15 million excess deaths and an […]

Background Information The increasing frequency and severity of infectious disease outbreaks—driven by factors such as climate change, new methods of land use, urbanization, and global interconnectedness—underscore the urgent need for robust pandemic risk assessment frameworks. Future pandemics, which will likely be exacerbated by complex anthropogenic factors and inadequate systems for infectious disease surveillance and response, pose a substantial and underappreciated […]