Pathogen Epidemiology Review Group

The Pathogen Epidemiology Review Group (PERG) under the leadership of Dr Anne Cori, are undertaking an ambitious project to make key epidemiological information widely accessible in a standardised and easy-to-access way. This will help the global research and policy community to rapidly access the latest and best available evidence during future epidemics, so that they can act as quickly and effectively as possible.

PERG are undertaking a series of systematic literature reviews for nine pathogens identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as most likely to cause a future epidemic or pandemic. The aim is to create a central standardised database of epidemiological parameters to aid in the design and implementation of modelling, initially focusing on these nine WHO priority pathogens, but with a possibility to later further expand. PERG is a key collaborator of the WHO Global Repository of Epidemic Parameter project of the recently formed WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence.

PERG is designing an interface that presents the data in a clear, user-friendly and synthetic way. In addition, an accompanying R package, epireview, is developed as a key component of this work. By maximising the usability and dissemination of the information that is being collected, we aim for all outputs to be 1) easy for policy-makers and the broader scientific community to access; and 2) always kept up to date with new information added when available.

Emeritus team