Productive disruption: opportunities and challenges for innovation in infectious disease surveillance

Abstract

Infectious diseases place an unacceptable and disproportionate social and economic burden on low-income countries. National disease control programmes have the difficult task of allocating limited budgets for interventions across regions of their countries, based on often disparate datasets of varying quality from a range of sources including clinics, hospitals, village health workers, the private sector and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Every stage of the data collection and analysis pipeline for surveillance systems may be affected by a lack of capacity as well as by biases and misaligned incentives for reporting and managing data. Addressing these issues will be essential for effective reduction in the burden of endemic infectious diseases globally as well as to preparing for emerging epidemic threats.