Emerging and Re-emerging threats

The landscape of infectious disease epidemics is changing fast. The COVID-19 pandemic was proof that new pathogens may emerge and may cause large-scale epidemics with a substantial burden on global welfare: strains of influenza, coronaviruses or multiresistant bacteria are among the most closely surveilled candidates. Much methodological research is needed to prepare us for disease X - the next pandemic. But well-known pathogens are an equally looming threat, as they move and adapt to new geographic areas and communities or re-emerge where they had been eliminated. It is the case, for instance, of mosquito-borne diseases like arboviruses (dengue, chikungunya, Zika) and malaria.

What we do:

• we develop estimates of risk and vulnerability at high spatial and temporal resolution;
• we determine the cost-effectiveness and optimal resolution of intervention aimed at prevention and containment;
• we apply our methodologies both to hypothetical emergence events of respiratory pathogens and to the importation and establishement of vector-borne pathogens to previously unaffected areas.