“UK announces early warning system for pandemics” by Agustín Covarrubias 🔸

This is a link post. The UK just announced plans to create a continuous metagenomic sequencing system for detecting respiratory pathogens. The system is based on point-of-care sequencing of patients showing up with severe respiratory infections, aiming for diagnosis within 6 hours and allowing the NHS to track emerging pathogens of both artificial or natural origin. The NHS plans to roll this out to 10-30 NHS sites, but no concrete timeline has been announced. Patients suspected of having severe acute respiratory infections will be diagnosed within 6 hours, supporting the establishment of a new diagnostic system (...) It will be used in the expansion of NHS England's Respiratory Metagenomics programme, being led by Guy's and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. It uses samples from patients with severe respiratory infections and rapid genetic testing to match those patients with the right treatments within 6 hours. (...) Following an initial successful pilot [...] --- First published: November 6th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5bwpg9RF62gFqRpPS/uk-announces-early-warning-system-for-pandemics --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.