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Speaker: Dr. David Heymann

Dr. David Heymann is the Director of the Cluster of Communicable Disease Programmes at WHO/Geneva. He is a Physician, and holds a DTMH from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has been a career CDC officer for 24 years, and has worked with the WHO Smallpox Eradication Program, various ministries of health in Africa and Asia, and with the WHO Global Program on AIDS.

WHO is the CDC for the world, doing internationally what the CDC does domestically. WHO 1) provides guidance, 2) creates consensus and 3) provides policy suggestions. WHO's mandate within its Member States is to give guidance: we influence national health policy as the CDC influences policy in individual states.

WHO's Division of Emerging and other Communicable Diseases (EMC) was created 3 years ago following the international turmoil caused by plague in India and the Ebola outbreak in Zaire. The Division brought together expertise in disease surveillance and viral, bacterial and zoonotic diseases (diseases of animals potentially transmissible to humans) to address the problem of emerging and re-emerging communicable diseases that could become international threats to public health. Our first task was to identify what emerging diseases are and the nature of the global situation, and then to build a program to address these problems.

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