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Advanced Technologies for Control of Infectious Diseases

Novel diseases have arisen in different parts of the world over the past few years. The

most recent example is the COVID-19 virus, which has spread across the globe and

becomes a pandemic. Infectious diseases may be caused by a new pathogen or

reemerge in a population or geographic region, spreading locally or globally

depending on the mode of transmission and pandemic potential. Outbreaks of

various viral infections around the world emphasize the significance of surveillance

networks for enormous infectious diseases. This includes the SARS epidemic in

2003, the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, the reemergence of Chikungunya virus,

the outbreaks of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and

Ebola virus in West Africa, and the latest outbreak and dissemination of COVID-19

virus, which has caused widespread disruption across the world.

On the other hand, these novel diseases can be linked to not only human factors,

such as population density, transport, and migration from one location to another,

but also environmental factors, such as agricultural practices and climate change. In

the healthcare industry, newer and more sophisticated technologies are being devel-

oped rapidly, and as a result, these technologies are becoming more widely available

and accessible. These may be effective in monitoring and stopping the transmission

of infectious diseases.

Highly advanced molecular technology can not only assist in the accelerated

identification of pathogens at the molecular level but can also be used to more

accurately track the activities of infectious diseases. Public health institutions

employ software focused on Web-based surveillance and epidemic intelligence

approaches to enable risk management and predict outbreaks in time during

situations such as epidemics or pandemics (Allam and Jones 2020; Yu et al. 2020;

Michelozzi et al. 2020; Chu et al. 2020; Ricoca Peixoto et al. 2020). Event-based

surveillance

systems

(e.g.,

GPHIN,

ProMed-mail, HealthMap, EpiSPIDER,

BioCaster) are among the applications used to track outbreaks and emerging health

risks, such as SARS. Real-time tracking of epidemic incidence is done using

Web-based real-time surveillance (e.g., Google Trends, Google Flu Trends); Early

Warning, Alert, and Response Networks (such as GOARN) are used to identify

interinstitutional contact, public health risks, and the execution of preventive and

control measures (i.e., WHO Global Alert and Response). Infectious disease

modeling, such as agent-based model and metapopulation models (GLEAM,

FRED, gravity model), is used for epidemic simulation assessment of disease spread

determinants. Such social media benefits in reporting and advising people about the

state of a given infectious disease and hence plays a vital role in participatory

epidemiology, for example, illnesses of food, seasonal flu activity, etc. New tech-

nology, such as genome-wide sequencing, microarrays, and bioinformatics, aids in

the discovery of pathogens and viruses, wildlife sampling and surveillance, predic-

tive modeling, and drug discovery by numerous approaches, such as detecting

existing therapeutic agents, early detection of COVID-19, discovering the genetic

sequence of COVID-19, and its categorization as well as an exploration of COVID-

related antiviral and potential biomarkers (protein targets) (Yu et al. 2020; Christaki

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Emerging Technologies: Gateway to Understand Molecular Insight of. . .

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