Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) is the world’s leading initiative for open-source intelligence for public health decision-making. It is led by the WHO as part of its constitutional mandate as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work. EIOS is built on three pillars: a growing global community of practice, a range of multi-disciplinary collaborators and an evolving fit-for-purpose system. The system builds on a long-standing collaboration between WHO and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission (EC).

Since January 2022, the lead of the EIOS initiative is hosted within the new WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. As one of the Hub’s flagship initiatives, EIOS supports its overall mission to facilitate the global collaboration of partners from multiple sectors, supporting countries and other stakeholders to address future pandemic and epidemic risks with better access to data, better analytical capacities, and better tools and insights for decision-making. With support from the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany, the WHO Pandemic Hub was established in September 2021 in Berlin, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which demonstrated weaknesses around the world in how countries detect, monitor and manage public health threats.

In an increasingly connected world, threats to public health have the potential to quickly spread from local to national, regional and international levels, affecting global health security faster than ever before. The EIOS initiative aims to mitigate and, ideally, prevent public health emergencies by connecting experts around the world and providing them with the best possible solutions to detect, contextualise, analyse, assess and share information for quick, evidence-based action. As such, the EIOS initiative is by and for experts across national and international organisations, networks and government entities engaged in emergency preparedness and response.

The EIOS Newsletter covers news and updates related to the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) initiative. Published quarterly by the EIOS Core Team, it transitioned to an electronic format starting in the second half of 2024. Earlier issues, available as PDFs, are also accessible below.

Publications included in this section showcase articles describing practical use cases of the EIOS initiative or in which the EIOS system is analysed, evaluated, or compared to other public health intelligence systems. The EIOS Core Team makes no claims or guarantees about the completeness, accuracy, content or quality of information contained.