As we continue as a global collective to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, it is certainly a privilege for the PHA4GE consortium to share some practical implementation projects that have been initiated since our last communication. Our concerted effort to implement data standards in public health laboratories was accelerated by funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support ten research teams in Africa and Southeast Asia. These teams partner with public health institutes to assess and implement data standards and reproducible bioinformatics pipelines to achieve a timely public health response for the control of disease outbreaks. In this newsletter we introduce each of these 10 teams.
The Ethics and Data Sharing working has gained momentum. Among the projects that are highlighted by Anja Bedeker is a meta-data standard for ethical research data. We look forward to wider participation as we grapple with the very real challenge of sharing pathogen data in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jamie Southgate reports on the Bioinformatics pipelines working group’s recent publication. The group released a guidance document that defines the major challenges faced in public health to integrate technologies in response to SARS-COV-2 analysis and to highlight various open-source resources available in the public health space.
In this newsletter we get to know Dr Josefina Campos, Director of “National Center of Genomics and Bioinformatics -ANLIS ‘Dr Carlos G Malbrán”, which forms an integral part of the National Administration of laboratories and for Health Institutes in Argentina. We get insight into the genomics surveillance work in Argentina and how it interfaces with the broader Latin American bioinformatics public health initiatives.
Rangarirai Matima discusses organisational resilience and its associated enablers in the context of healthcare systems that face public health threats.
Alan Christoffels
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