How to End a Pandemic
The How to End a Pandemic project is a Georgetown University initiative to systematically collect oral histories and insights from people who work in epidemics about how to end epidemics. Our guests come from media, politics, medicine, humanities, the social sciences, public policy, and business to help us answer the question “how can we end pandemics in ways that are smarter, faster, more equitable, and more humane?”
How to End a Pandemic
Gail Carson — Creating a Database of Over a Million Case Records From 1,700+ Sites Across the Globe, Becoming an Infectious Disease Doctor, The Growing Epidemic of Networks, Treating ISARIC as if It Was a Garden (#5)
Quote: “No one institution can possibly do it on their own”
Dr Gail Carson is an adult infectious diseases doctor by background who joined the first GOARN (network of institutions preparing and responding to outbreaks) mission to Gulu in 2000. Since then her career has been focussed on outbreak preparedness and response. She was fortunate enough to serve on other missions including time spent at WHO Geneva. While seconded to WHO Geneva for SARS in 2003 she set up the SARS clinical network and saw the value of immediate communication across countries to assist with the rapid sharing of knowledge to advance patient care and policy. Her first consultant post after training was with the public health agency of England, with their special pathogens branch. From there she moved to the University of Oxford to help set up an international clinical research consortium/network called ISARIC. In 2014, she was part of the Secretariat that supported the new research funders consortium GloPID R. In 2016 she was delighted to be selected to sit on the GOARN steering committee, subsequently set up GOARN Research, became deputy chair in 2018 and Chair of the Steering committee in 2022. Throughout her career she has witnessed first-hand the benefits of collaborative working and hopes that this continues as such an approach will always be needed.
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