Publications

2024 is the year of international climate change litigation, with accountability for the protection of health elevated to global and regional courts and tribunals. On April 9, 2024, the European Court of Human Rights concluded that Switzerland violated the rights of a group of older Swiss women, known as the KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, who had brought the case against Switzerland for failing to meet its past greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets and set future GHG targets.

At the end of May, 194 member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) will meet for the World Health Assembly. Negotiations underway now will determine whether they vote then to adopt a pandemic agreement. For the past 2 years, discussions have focused on articulating essential components of a robust and equitable architecture for pandemic preparedness and response. Despite this, talks have failed to produce sufficient consensus on a detailed draft, prompting the intergovernmental negotiating body to propose a “streamlined” version.

Bioindustrial manufacturing is undergoing rapid expansion and investment and is seen as integral to nations’ economic progress. Ensuring that bioindustrial manufacturing benefits society as the field expands is of critical, urgent importance. To better understand the industry’s ethical trajectory and to shape policy, we explored the views of biotechnology leaders on four aspects of ethical and social responsibility—safety, security, social responsibility, and sustainability—what we have termed “4S principles.” We identified policy actions governments and other stakeholders may take to maximize societal benefits in industrial biotechnology.

In the United States, state, tribal, local, and territorial public health agencies play a vital role in responding to infectious disease outbreaks. One foundational strategy for controlling communicable diseases is case investigation/contact tracing (CI/CT), an approach that has been routinely employed in the United States and global settings to control sexually transmitted infections, tuberculosis, and outbreaks of emerging infections such as Ebola and COVID-19.¹ When effectively implemented at the early stages of an outbreak, CI/CT programs promptly identify cases and their contacts and apply prevention and control measures, thereby preventing onward transmission of disease in communities.¹

In this case study, we describe a well-resourced private school in New York City that implemented COVID-19mitigation measures based on public health expert guidance and the lessons learned from this process

Rasmussen et al. argue that “increasing oversight across virology or all microbe research would represent a misdirection of resources and would fail to provide a commensurate increase in safety or security” and “harm surveillance, antiviral discovery, monitoring for resistance to antivirals and vaccines, and other critical efforts.” On the contrary, a strengthened version of the recommendations of the National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity (NSABB) is crucial for the success of microbiological science. Implementing these recommendations would reduce the risks of a deliberate or accidental pandemic, while using precious research resources efficiently, restoring trust in science, strengthening US leadership in biosecurity and biosafety, and safeguarding the biomedical research enterprise, as ASM itself has said.

A scoping literature review of learnings from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic was commissioned by WHO to inform operational priorities for future respiratory pathogen pandemic preparedness. The learnings are grouped according to WHO’s subsystems for health emergency preparedness, response and resilience. Key takeaway messages include: 1) Preparedness works; 2) Health is everyone’s business; 3) No one is safe until everyone is safe; and 4) Response must be agile and adaptive. The review will support pandemic planners at all levels to develop and update preparedness and response plans.

The Adenoviridae viral family is divided into 6 genera, with only members of the genus Mastadenovirus known to infect mammals, including humans.

This is the first of a 2-part special feature that focuses on threat agnostic approaches for the early detection of naturally occurring or humanmade biological threats, which are critical for a robust biodefense and public health response.

The Practical playbook for addressing health misinformation provides guidance on ways public health and medical professionals can set themselves up for success, make decisions on when they need to act to address misinformation, choose which actions and approaches might be useful to their audiences and information needs, and evaluate how their efforts are working.

This report calls out the urgent need to strengthen and build resilience in primary care (PC) whilst building cross-sector collaboration between public health (PH) and community-based organizations (CBOs).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries often needed to divert their human, financial and material resources away from existing health programmes to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. There are numerous reports of global inequities in access to critical care and medical countermeasures exacerbated by the pandemic as a consequence of chronically underfunded and weakened public health systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly affected all mass gatherings for sporting and religious events, causing cancellation, postponement, or downsizing.

Paramyxoviridae is a large viral family that contains many once common and well-known human pathogens, such as measles and mumps, as well as other pathogens that pose concerns for their potential to cause epidemic or pandemic disease.¹

Integrated vaccine delivery – the linkage of routine vaccination with provision of other essential health services – is a hallmark of robust primary care systems that has been linked to equitable improvements in population health outcomes.