NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, May 7, 2015

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to create a network of disease-surveillance teams in poor countries to do “minimal autopsies” on children to plumb causes of child mortality and also possibly spot emerging epidemics, the foundation announced Wednesday.

Although the effort will be modest at first — a $75 million donation to start small teams in six countries — the foundation hopes to expand to as many as 25 Asian and African countries, with dozens of members on each team.

The network will include the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Emory University’s Global Health Institute.

The surveillance teams could fill a crucial gap in detecting disease outbreaks. Local news outlets sometimes report unusual clusters of illnesses and deaths, reports of which may reach the World Health Organization in Geneva or circle the world on disease-surveillance websites. But it can still take days or weeks until the true cause is determined. That happened in rural Guinea when West Africa’s large Ebola outbreak first began smoldering, for example.

Ideally, the teams will visit families as soon as possible after children die, ask about their symptoms and, if given permission, photograph the bodies and take needle biopsies from lungs, brains, livers, spleens, kidneys and other organs. The samples will be sent to W.H.O.-certified regional laboratories or to the C.D.C. in Atlanta to establish the cause of each child’s death.

This kind of network “will help make the world a healthier, safer place,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the C.D.C.’s director.