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0:00
Hello, I'm Martin Maiden.
I'm in the Department of Biology
at the University of Oxford
with my colleague
Charlene Rodrigues.
We're going to be
presenting a talk on
genomic methods for tracking
bacterial pathogens
for clinical and
public health benefit.
This is the first of two talks.
In the second talk,
Charlene will be taking
us through a number
of case studies.
0:23
Here's the outline
of the two talks.
In the first talk, today,
I'm going to discuss
why genomic
surveillance is needed.
Describe how to perform
genomic surveillance,
including the pitfalls
and difficulties.
In the second talk,
Charlene will talk about
case studies that
demonstrate the use of
genomic surveillance in
clinical and public
health settings.
That's a very important part
of what we're talking
about in these two talks,
is not just genomics,
but how genomics can be used for
translational benefit
in the public health
and clinical health space.
0:57
We'll discuss why we
track the pathogens.
The questions which
we're addressing
this particular
application of clinical
and public health
applications are crucial
to why and how we
do this tracking.
Firstly is diagnosis.
We need often to identify
the causes of disease
and to subtype those
causes of diseases
for reasons that I'll
mention in a moment.
Then we might want to do
localised epidemiology,
which is the surveillance
of resistance organisms
or the investigation of
hospital outbreaks and so on,
so that we can determine
what localised public
health measures
might need to be done.
As we get up onto
yet another scale,
we get on to regional and
national epidemiology.
In this situation, usually
national, regional
or international bodies are
trying to identify trends
in disease and characterising
pathogen variance,
very much in the
way we've seen in
the COVID-19 pandemic
in order to tailor
both interventions and to track
how a disease is progressing.
That leads into, finally,
international global
disease surveillance,
which is typically done
over the global scale
and over very long periods
of time to identify
pathogens of interest,
pathogens of concern,
to identify when
outbreaks occur,
particularly international
outbreaks and pandemics.
All of these feed into
research and development
of novel treatments
and interventions.
