How Can Data Help Fight Disease?

This video from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation highlights the essential role data and information play in finding and preventing poliovirus. After smallpox, polio will be the second disease in human history that we will have stopped for good. Less than 25 years ago, polio was rampant in 125 countries, crippling 1,000 children per day. Since then, the incidence of polio has decreased by 99%. How did the world manage that kind of progress?

According to the Gates Foundation, one of the partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), the fight against polio has involved doing two things simultaneously: finding out where polio is occurring and protecting children from it using vaccines. Because of the partnership, millions of vaccines have reached children around the world. By testing stool samples from children with paralysis, a symptom of polio, the infection can be diagnosed and its origin pinpointed. Once an infection is pinpointed, as many children as possible receive extra vaccine doses to boost immunity. Data about cases, the size of the outbreak, population affected, and information on the vaccination programme are then collected and shared with the whole partner network via a centralised, global data platform called Polio Information System (POLIS). Combining these massive amounts of valuable information and looking at it holistically has made it possible to develop new research that has led to new tools for better estimating population numbers - knowing how much vaccine is needed for a particular area makes a big difference. Thanks to better data available rapidly, every new outbreak can now be responded to within about 72 hours.

Meanwhile, global partnerships push forward new diagnostic tools, better childhood vaccines, and outbreak response strategies. These products of the polio eradication effort can be used to fight other health threats, such as measles and Ebola, and leading childhood killers such as pneumonia and severe diarrhoea.