Dear Friends and Colleagues,
On behalf of the Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research (CIDER), it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our Centre’s page.
At CIDER, we advocate and promote the need for regional and global partnerships to strengthen biosurveillance system to understand, prevent and mitigate the threats of infectious diseases of concerns. We generate scientific evidence with the main objective to inform national policies and strategies in order to foster healthier communities.
Emerging infections and deliberate biothreats can cause public health emergencies with the potential to kill thousands or millions of people. They not only undermine the health of the general public, but may also compromise the efficacy and quality of patient care in times of emergencies. Ultimately, national economies could be destabilized, and that may also pose a challenge to national security. Aligned with the importance of global health security, there is increasing interest and commitment toward building a “all-hazard” pandemic preparedness plan – a plan that also looks into the sustainability of capabilities and business continuity in countries when epidemic strikes.
With the emergence and spread of new microbes; globalistion of travel and trade; rise of drug resistance; and the potential use of laboratories to produce and release—intentionally or not—dangerous microbes, an infectious disease threat simmering anywhere can rapidly manifest into a full-blown one everywhere.
Finally, I also wish to express my sincere thanks to former directors, Assoc Prof Hsu Li Yang (2012 – 2014) and Prof Teo Yik Ying (2015 – 2017) as they built up CIDER’s capabilities and interconnected network of research collaborations under their capable leadership – an evolution that has already made us more effective and well poised to building stronger global health security with more robust health systems which effectively prevent epidemics as well as detect biothreats early for timely and appropriate responses by relevant stakeholders.
We look forward to your continuing support.
Thank you.
Dr Vincent Pang
Director
Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research (CIDER)
