Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for inviting me to be a part of this important discussion today.
First let me introduce myself and tell you a bit about my background and its relevance to today's meeting. My name is Kamran Khan, and I'm a physician trained in internal medicine, infectious diseases, and preventive medicine and public health. I practise medicine and am an epidemiologist who has been studying outbreaks and emerging infectious diseases at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto for the past 17 years. I'm a professor of medicine and public health at the University of Toronto and am the founder and CEO of a digital health company called BlueDot.
What has motivated me to dedicate my professional life as a clinician, an academic and an entrepreneur to the field of emerging infectious diseases? Twenty years ago, I began my training in infectious diseases and public health in New York when West Nile virus arrived in the city and began its westward march across the continent. Two years later, shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, anthrax was weaponized and dispersed through the U.S. postal system, reminding us that deadly outbreaks can arise from deliberate acts. After returning to my home in Toronto two years later, a coronavirus known as SARS spread from mainland China to dozens of cities and countries around the world, including Toronto, where it triggered a deadly outbreak that lasted four very long months. While the world had never seen an outbreak quite like SARS before, it was clear that this wouldn't be the last time.
The world is changing in ways that are driving the emergence and spread of dangerous diseases, but it's also changing in other ways that can play to our advantage. The rise of big data, the advent of artificial intelligence and emerging digital technologies offer us the raw materials needed to literally spread knowledge around the world faster than any outbreak. This was the inspiration for BlueDot's founding six and a half years ago, to build a digital global early warning system for infectious diseases that can transform how the world prepares for and responds to tomorrow's inevitable infectious disease threats, whether they arise from Mother Nature, accidents or deliberate acts.
The early warning system we have developed at BlueDot serves three key objectives: first, to detect infectious disease threats as early as possible to buy ourselves valuable time; second, to assess their potential for global spread and impact so that we can channel our finite resources to the right place at the right moment; third, to empower a wider array of decision-makers, from government to health care to the private sector, with timely insights so that together we can mobilize highly effective, efficient and coordinated responses.
To detect threats at their earliest stages, our early warning system processes vast amounts of online data in 65 languages, searching for early signals of outbreaks involving over 150 different diseases and syndromes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The surveillance engine does not rely solely on official news of outbreaks reported by government agencies, but also analyzes unofficial information generated through digital media, health blogs and other online sources.
This engine picked up an article in Chinese on the morning of December 31, 2019, reporting on an outbreak of pneumonia of an unknown cause in Wuhan, China. This event certainly captured my attention, given the number of parallels to the emergence of SARS in 2003. Within a few seconds of detecting the outbreak in Wuhan, our system analyzed the flight schedules and anonymous itineraries of hundreds of thousands of travellers departing Wuhan on commercial flights for destinations around the world. Given our early concerns about this outbreak, my team submitted results of this analysis for publication in an open access, peer-reviewed scientific journal on January 8, 2020, in order to make this data freely available for anyone to access. This analysis accurately identified many of the cities outside of mainland China that were among the first to confirm cases of COVID-19.
As cases of COVID-19 arrived in North America, our team began generating insights to support public health efforts to mitigate domestic transmission of this virus within our communities. These analyses made use of anonymous location data generated from mobile apps to understand the movements of populations—critical insights for public health officials to optimize and strategically make use of their finite human resources across the country and over time.
It's worth noting that BlueDot only makes use of third party data that is anonymized, adheres to all legal and regulatory requirements, and is aggregated up to the level of populations. These location data have been used for years in sectors from urban planning to transportation to retail, among others. Here, we're making use of them for the sole purpose of safeguarding communities and protecting lives during the midst of a pandemic.
At BlueDot, our diverse team, comprising physicians, veterinarians, epidemiologists, geographers, ecologists, data scientists and engineers, has been diligently working for the past six and a half years leveraging data, advanced analytics and emerging digital technologies to develop innovative solutions that are capable of generating insights to mitigate risks from infectious disease threats in our rapidly changing world. But insights are only meaningful if they are translated into action, and that translation can only happen through partnerships.
In this regard, BlueDot has a long-standing partnership with Global Affairs Canada, going back to 2014, in which we have been building and implementing digital systems to manage infectious disease risks across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. In 2019 we began a partnership with the Public Health Agency of Canada, channelling our efforts to mitigate domestic risks from global infectious diseases. Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic evolves into new phases, we continue to work together to mitigate its impacts across the country.
I’d like to conclude by saying that Mother Nature is sending us a message. A confluence of forces in our rapidly changing world—population growth, urbanization, the industrialization of agriculture, the disruption of wildlife ecosystems, climate change and increases in global population mobility—is accelerating the emergence and global spread of infectious diseases with unprecedented consequences. As global citizens, this is a reality we have to confront, or we risk finding ourselves in the same precarious position we are in today a few years down the road.
We have also learned that outbreaks move incredibly fast in our hyper-connected world. If we want to remain a step ahead, we are going to have to move even faster. Thankfully, we have what is needed to generate powerful insights: access to diverse and novel data, and human intelligence coupled with artificial intelligence to derive meaning from these complex data.
We need to translate insights into actions that reach across the whole of society. Governments empowered with timely insights will be better able to protect their citizens and economies from dangerous global infectious diseases. Hospitals and health care providers will be better able to protect themselves and the rest of us from these very same diseases. Businesses will be better able to protect the lives and livelihoods of their employees and customers. Creating an ecosystem to manage these risks together is not only possible, but, in my opinion, necessary.
A final thought to leave with you is that our most valuable resource is time, and it is a non-renewable resource. When we get through COVID-19—and we will—the question for all of us will be whether we will use every day of peacetime to prepare for the next inevitable threat with the same sense of urgency with which we are responding to COVID-19 today.
Thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts with this committee.