sharon sanders
Editor-in-Chief & President
Our Mission <!-- Administrators can ping and refresh feed items -->
Posted <abbr class="created" title="2008-01-16T23:40:16-0800">January 16th, 2008</abbr> by admin
InSTEDD is an innovation lab for technologies designed to improve early disease detection and rapid disaster response.
Disease and disaster are usually viewed as separate topics, handled by different agencies and specialists. But there is no humanitarian crisis that does not have a health component, or a serious outbreak of disease that does not have a humanitarian dimension.
According to a recent Oxfam report, there has been a four-fold increase in the annual number of natural disasters.
Increased trade and travel, high-volume livestock and poultry operations, a shifting climate and a burgeoning human population have also led to a disturbing global increase and spread of newly identified pathogens (HIV/AIDS, SARS, hantavirus), a resurgence of familiar plagues (TB, malaria, polio), and the emergence of deadly new strains (H5N1 avian influenza, West Nile virus, antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus).
Mortality statistics only begin to tell the story. The costs of a disease outbreak or a natural disaster are devastating for families, communities and countries. AIDS leaves children orphans. Floods, fires and earthquakes destroy homes. Disease outbreaks cripple food supplies and ruin livelihoods.
InSTEDD works with universities, corporations, international health organizations, humanitarian NGOs and communities. Together, we work to identify or craft and then field-test technologies for better data collection and analysis, more efficient communications, and more effective response. InSTEDD will, for example, be adapting new social networking capabilities for humanitarian coordination, and testing inflatable satellite dishes able to be carried in a backpack.
InSTEDD’s mission is to discover, develop, test, deploy and share information about technologies that buy critical time. Through better disease detection and response times, outbreaks can be contained and possibly prevented. Through better disaster response, more lives can be saved. Through collaboration better answers can be found.
http://instedd.org/
Posted <abbr class="created" title="2008-01-16T23:40:16-0800">January 16th, 2008</abbr> by admin
InSTEDD is an innovation lab for technologies designed to improve early disease detection and rapid disaster response.
Disease and disaster are usually viewed as separate topics, handled by different agencies and specialists. But there is no humanitarian crisis that does not have a health component, or a serious outbreak of disease that does not have a humanitarian dimension.
According to a recent Oxfam report, there has been a four-fold increase in the annual number of natural disasters.
Increased trade and travel, high-volume livestock and poultry operations, a shifting climate and a burgeoning human population have also led to a disturbing global increase and spread of newly identified pathogens (HIV/AIDS, SARS, hantavirus), a resurgence of familiar plagues (TB, malaria, polio), and the emergence of deadly new strains (H5N1 avian influenza, West Nile virus, antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus).
Mortality statistics only begin to tell the story. The costs of a disease outbreak or a natural disaster are devastating for families, communities and countries. AIDS leaves children orphans. Floods, fires and earthquakes destroy homes. Disease outbreaks cripple food supplies and ruin livelihoods.
InSTEDD works with universities, corporations, international health organizations, humanitarian NGOs and communities. Together, we work to identify or craft and then field-test technologies for better data collection and analysis, more efficient communications, and more effective response. InSTEDD will, for example, be adapting new social networking capabilities for humanitarian coordination, and testing inflatable satellite dishes able to be carried in a backpack.
InSTEDD’s mission is to discover, develop, test, deploy and share information about technologies that buy critical time. Through better disease detection and response times, outbreaks can be contained and possibly prevented. Through better disaster response, more lives can be saved. Through collaboration better answers can be found.
http://instedd.org/