Serge Tonen-Wolyec, a coordinator at the Interdisciplinary Center for Translational Research in Medicine and Health Sciences in Bunia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Laurent Belec, a virologist at Paris Cité University, outline steps to identify new epidemics faster.
The authors note that identifying infected people and isolating them can be key to managing emerging diseases. Current surveillance systems allow many emerging, evolving or unfamiliar diseases to go undetected.
Tonen-Wolyec and Belec argue that better diagnostics could have limited the current deadly Ebola outbreak in Africa. They point to recent disease outbreaks including COVID-19, mpox and hantavirus as examples of diseases that grabbed headlines in recent years. Early detection and containment make outbreaks easier to control.