ArticlePLOS global public health2023
The World Health Organization's Disease Outbreak News: A retrospective database.
Article in PLOS global public health, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Effectiveness of antiviral, immunomodulatory and platelet-enhancing agents for treatment of dengue infection: A systematic review.Virulence · 2025Pooled it
- Exploring the Mosquito-Arbovirus Network: A Survey of Vector Competence Experiments.The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene · 2023Pooled it
- Reporting trends and seasonality in the World Health Organization's Disease Outbreak News (DONs) across 1996-2023.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Variations in annual dengue intensities are explained by temperature anomalies.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Lessons for medical countermeasure development from unforeseen outbreaks.Emerging microbes & infections · 2025Review
- Assessing the Quality of World Health Organisation Guidelines during Health Emergencies: A Domain-Based Analysis.Journal of epidemiology and global health · 2025Article
- Article
- Longitudinal surveillance of Aedes aegypti (Diptera: Culicidae) in urban coastal Kenya: population dynamics, blood feeding frequency and dengue virus infection rates.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- An epidemiological knowledge graph extracted from the World Health Organization's Disease Outbreak News.Scientific data · 2025Article
- ARBOALVO: A Bayesian spatiotemporal learning and predictive model for dengue cases in the endemic Northeast city of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2025Article
- Harnessing defective interfering particles and lipid nanoparticles for effective delivery of an anti-dengue virus RNA therapy.Molecular therapy. Nucleic acids · 2025Article
- Genomic Characterization of Circulating Dengue Virus, Ethiopia, 2022-2023.Emerging infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Constructing a global human epidemic database using open-source digital biosurveillance.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Article
- What makes an epidemic a disaster: the future of epidemics within the EM-DAT International Disaster Database.BMC public health · 2025Article
- The WHO Disease Outbreak News during the Covid-19 pandemic.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Leveraging disease outbreak news to strengthen the global response to antimicrobial resistance: a call for action.Frontiers in public health · 2025Review
- Beyond early warning: towards greater granularity in the use of event-based surveillance for public health emergencies.BMC public health · 2024Article
- To vaccinate or not to vaccinate patients undergoing biologic treatment in dengue-endemic countries?JAAD international · 2024Article
- An easier life to come for mosquito researchers: field-testing across Italy supports VECTRACK system for automatic counting, identification and absolute density estimation of Aedes albopictus and Culex pipiens adults.Parasites & vectors · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The World Health Organization (WHO) notifies the global community about disease outbreaks through the Disease Outbreak News (DON). These online reports tell important stories about both outbreaks themselves and the high-level decision making that governs information sharing during public health emergencies. However, they have been used only minimally in global health scholarship to date. Here, we collate all 2,789 of these reports from their first use through the start of the Covid-19 pandemic (January 1996 to December 2019), and develop an annotated database of the subjective and often inconsistent information they contain. We find that these reports are dominated by a mix of persistent worldwide threats (particularly influenza and cholera) and persistent epidemics (like Ebola virus disease in Africa or MERS-CoV in the Middle East), but also document important periods in history like the anthrax bioterrorist attacks at the turn of the century, the spread of chikungunya and Zika virus to the Americas, or even recent lapses in progress towards polio elimination. We present three simple vignettes that show how researchers can use these data to answer both qualitative and quantitative questions about global outbreak dynamics and public health response. However, we also find that the retrospective value of these reports is visibly limited by inconsistent reporting (e.g., of disease names, case totals, mortality, and actions taken to curtail spread). We conclude that sharing a transparent rubric for which outbreaks are considered reportable, and adopting more standardized formats for sharing epidemiological metadata, might help make the DON more useful to researchers and policymakers.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.