Disease Monitoring - Mass Gatherings

The World Health Organization notes on its Global Alert and Response website that Mass Gatherings (where large groups of people gather for events or activities) are “a stress test for public health.  Crowds, and the infrastructures that support them, can be an ideal setting for outbreaks of disease”.

The multinational Global Partnership for Peace program, launched at the G8 meetings in Kananaskis, Canada in 2000, recently expanded its program of reducing risk through employment of scientific personnel in the nations of the Former Soviet Union, to a new, broader focus on prevention and mitigation of global spread of disease, with a specific focus now on disease monitoring and surveillance at mass gatherings.

Dycor has direct experience in the deployment of disease monitoring and surveillance capability at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada, and again at the G8/G20 Leaders’ Meetings held in Toronto, Canada in June 2010.    These deployments provided real-time aerosol monitoring and detection capability, coupled with meterological and HVAC data, to provide a packaged, analytical assessment of aerosol events compared to normal background conditions, giving first responders, medical countermeasures and security personnel an enhanced level of situational awareness contributing to effective management of response decisions.

Dycor’s understanding of aerosol behavior, collection and interpretation of data, and integration of analyses into communications and decision-making infrastructures identifies us as key Subject Matter Experts in analysis, deployment, and effective management of disease monitoring at events and locations where large numbers of people meet. 

Whether these are one-time, high-profile events, such as the Olympics, or locations which experience periodic influx of large numbers of people (such as annual religious, sporting or cultural events), our strength is in analyzing requirements on the ground, and configuring systems for accurate monitoring, sampling, analysis and response.

For discussions on your requirements for security or public health considerations in tracking and responding to disease, contact Dycor to explore our capabilities and how they apply to your situation.