21st Century Business Herald:

In recent years, there's been growing recognition of early detection's crucial role in preventing and controlling infectious diseases. Could you highlight some new features and initiatives in China's current infectious disease monitoring and early warning system? Thank you.

Wang Hesheng:

Thank you for your question. Strengthening monitoring and early warning systems to ensure that risks are identified as soon as they emerge is the first step to effectively prevent and defuse the risk of epidemics. General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized that enhancing early monitoring and warning capabilities is an urgent priority in improving the public health system. The National Disease Control and Prevention Administration is committed to top-level design, a problem-oriented approach and clear priorities. We have made establishing and improving the infectious disease monitoring and early warning system our primary task.

In recent years, with support from the Ministry of Finance, NHC, Customs and other departments, we've established 10 infectious disease monitoring systems. These include sentinel hospitals, virus mutation tracking and urban sewage analysis, which have successfully supported early warning and prediction of infectious disease outbreaks. Responding to concurrent epidemics of respiratory infections like influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and mycoplasma pneumonia, we've implemented comprehensive monitoring of 15 common respiratory pathogens. This allows for "multi-disease monitoring and multi-testing from a single sample," enabling timely tracking of epidemic trends and pathogen composition. This approach has significantly bolstered clinical treatment and epidemic prevention efforts. Furthermore, we're accelerating the development of an information platform for infectious disease monitoring, early warning and emergency command. Building on pilot projects in Tianjin, Hubei and Anhui, we're deploying intelligent monitoring and early warning software to all secondary and higher-level medical institutions nationwide. This initiative aims to enhance effective information sharing between medical institutions and disease prevention and control institutions.

Recently, with the approval of the State Council, the National Disease Control and Prevention Administration, NHC and seven other departments jointly issued the "Guidance on Establishing and Improving an Intelligent Multi-Point Triggering System for Infectious Disease Monitoring and Early Warning." This guidance outlines plans to build a multi-point triggering, rapid-responding, and efficient infectious disease monitoring and early warning system by 2030. The goal is to achieve internationally advanced capabilities in early detection, scientific assessment and timely warning of epidemics. Moving forward, we will focus on implementing this guidance, emphasizing three key aspects: diversification of data sources, intelligent systems and standardized procedures. These efforts aim to enhance our capacity for infectious disease monitoring and early warning.

First, we will focus on multi-channel monitoring to enhance early detection and identification capabilities. While optimizing the direct online reporting system for infectious diseases, we'll primarily strengthen three active monitoring and early warning networks: sentinel hospitals, monitoring sites and network laboratories. We'll develop multi-source channels, including interdepartmental coordination, social perception and global epidemic monitoring. This approach will interconnect and cross-validate data from human, animal and environmental domains, enabling multi-point triggering and early warning.

Second, we will focus on leveraging new technologies to enhance intelligent systems. We'll employ big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other information technologies to build multi-dimensional monitoring and early warning indicators, databases and model repositories. This will enable automatic triggering, capture and early warning of abnormal signals. We aim to create a unified "dashboard" for monitoring and early warning, improving our capacity for data-driven decision-making.

Third, we will focus on standardized management to improve the timeliness of assessment and early warning. We'll enhance systems for infectious disease monitoring, risk assessment, early warning management and information disclosure. This will refine mechanisms for interdepartmental information sharing and consultation, enhance collaboration between hospitals and disease control institutions, and ensure a smooth transition from normal to emergency states. We'll promptly issue health risk alerts, warning bulletins and early warning recommendations in accordance with the law. By strengthening coordination between epidemic prevention, control and emergency response, we aim to effectively prevent and mitigate epidemic risks. Thank you.