Identifying Nontraditional Epidemic Disease Risk Factors Associated with Major Health Events from World Health Organization and World Bank Open Data

The World Health Organization's Disease Outbreak News: A retrospective database

The World Health Organization (WHO) notifies the global community about disease outbreaks through the Disease Outbreak News (DON). These online reports tell important stories about both outbreaks themselves and the high-level decision making that governs information sharing during public health emergencies. However, they have been used only minimally in global health scholarship to date. Here, we collate all 2,789 of these reports from their first use through the start of the Covid-19 pandemic (January 1996 to December 2019), and develop an annotated database of the subjective and often inconsistent information they contain. We find that these reports are dominated by a mix of persistent worldwide threats (particularly influenza and cholera) and persistent epidemics (like Ebola virus disease in Africa or MERS-CoV in the Middle East), but also document important periods in history like the anthrax bioterrorist attacks at the turn of the century, the spread of chikungunya and Zika virus to the Americas, or even recent lapses in progress towards polio elimination. We present three simple vignettes that show how researchers can use these data to answer both qualitative and quantitative questions about global outbreak dynamics and public health response. However, we also find that the retrospective value of these reports is visibly limited by inconsistent reporting (e.g., of disease names, case totals, mortality, and actions taken to curtail spread). We conclude that sharing a transparent rubric for which outbreaks are considered reportable, and adopting more standardized formats for sharing epidemiological metadata, might help make the DON more useful to researchers and policymakers.

Economic disparity among generations under the Paris Agreement

The costs and benefits of climate change mitigation are known to be distributed unevenly across time and space, while their intergenerational distribution across nations has not been evaluated. Here, we analyze the lifetime costs and benefits of climate change mitigation by age cohorts across countries under the Paris Agreement. Our results show that the age cohorts born prior to 1960 generally experience a net reduction in lifetime gross domestic product per capita. Age cohorts born after 1990 will gain net benefits from climate change mitigation in most lower income countries. However, no age cohorts enjoy net benefits regardless of the birth year in many higher income countries. Furthermore, the cost-benefit disparity among old and young age cohorts is expected to widen over time. Particularly, lower income countries are expected to have much larger cost-benefit disparity between the young and the old. Our findings highlight the challenges in building consensus for equitable climate policy among nations and generations.