On 20 Jun 2018, the GOARN Steering Committee accepted ProMED as a partner organization to collaborate in its mission to provide rapid recognition and response to disease outbreaks. The Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) is a technical partnership established in 2000 by WHO as a key mechanism to engage the resources of technical agencies for rapid identification, confirmation, and response to major international public health emergencies.

Dale Fisher, Professor at the National University of Singapore and Chair of the GOARN steering committee, welcomed ProMED as its newest partner to GOARN: “We have established relationships with over 200 partners, primarily related to our response activities, but many organizations also contribute to our training and research activities. Working with ProMED as a partner will significantly strengthen our “Alert” activities, which is obviously crucial in promoting early discussions and risk assessment of events.”

For ProMED, working more closely with GOARN is an opportunity to increase its engagement with the global health community. GOARN partnership represents an important step further ensuring that ProMED contributes to early warnings of outbreaks and interacts with WHO and its partners to more fully participate in outbreak responses. ProMED’s networks of subject matter experts can assist GOARN to be aware of developing outbreaks and rapidly provide additional situational and technical awareness. In addition, through EpiCore, ProMED helps confirm early signals of public health events by reaching out to more than 2200 EpiCore http://Epicore.org volunteer responders located throughout the world.

Larry Madoff, MD
Editor, ProMED
[email protected]>