Chatham House project begins for Strengthening Data Sharing for Public Health

Chatham House Centre on Global Health Security held high-level Strategy Roundtable on April 23, 2015 for The Strengthening Data Sharing for Public Health project.  The aim of the secret meeting (Chatham House Rules) “was to stimulate a high-quality dialogue among experts from a broad range of data sharing environments to help inform the project and its strategy going forward.” [1, 2]

At this time there is “no global framework or operational guidance for systematic sharing of public health surveillance data.”

Stated in the report “There is potential to build from the International Health Regulations and from the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) Framework (which promotes virus sequence sharing and benefit sharing) to develop a new framework of evolving guidelines and principles specifically around public health data sharing – which could be endorsed by the WHO and other international bodies”

Financial support was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In May 2017 Chatham House released “A guide to sharing the data and benefits of public health surveillance” which the WHO promote as part of their R&D Blueprint [3], and works with other non-state actors.