“We tend to discount the significance of prevention. We tend to reactive creatures by nature. If we do look at the last 20 years, however, we have had more major infectious disease events than in any other time in human history.”
Infectious disease physician and researcher Kamran Khan is an associate professor of public health at the University of Toronto, and he wants to make information spread faster than disease — not an easy feat in this time of fast-paced and high-volume travel.
The last two decades have seen several infectious disease outbreaks that put the whole globe on alert. In 1999, West Nile Virus made its way to North America. Just four years later, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) first appeared in Asia, spreading to over two dozen countries before being contained. In 2014, there was a massive outbreak of Ebola, only two years before the Zika virus triggered birth defects and widespread travel advisories for pregnant women.
“What do we know about how people move?” asks Khan. “How do we better understand the needs of people who are moving across the planet? How do we leverage data, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence? How do we leverage digital technologies to literally spread knowledge around the world faster than the diseases themselves?”
To tackle these complex problems, we need a team as diverse as the problem itself, says Khan. Infectious diseases can spread through vectors like mosquitoes or animals, from person to person, or through the environment.
“You really need a very diverse set of skills,” says Khan. “You need to have ecologists, and you need to have veterinarians, and data scientists, and designers and software developers, and engineers. All those different perspectives allow us to really tackle a problem that’s very complex.”
Bringing together a team with deep expertise in the science and the technology is the only way to respond to outbreaks as they emerge. That allows people to take the necessary actions and precautions to help contain the outbreak.
“What’s so exciting about the work I’m doing here as a scientist is the ability to reaching millions of lives in ways that we’ve never been able to do before,” adds Khan.
“That gets me out of bed every single morning, excited, passionate about what I’m doing. It doesn’t really feel like work. I feel like I just get to come play and do really exciting things every day, and there’s nothing better than that feeling.”