Dr. Thomas F. O'Brien and Dr. John Stelling
Drs. O’Brien and Stelling co-direct the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance, which is charged with developing infrastructure and tools to advance the initiative of global surveillance of antibiotic resistance. The last few years have seen development and worldwide deployment of a new version of their database software, now WHONET 2013; wider application of our data capture and conversion utility (BacLink 2) to extract data from hospital laboratory reporting systems; and new web-based tools for public health reporting to the CDC National Healthcare Safety Network and to state health departments.
WHONET and SaTScan are now being applied to detection of national outbreaks in a large Latin American country and of hospital outbreaks in a 45 hospital network in the U.S.. The Collaborating Centre has worked and its co-directors traveled extensively this year to provide data, reports and consultations to support the renewed efforts of WHO Geneva and its Regional Offices, including especially Western Pacific, to put the problem of antimicrobial resistance at the center of their attention and work and gain it a larger share of resources.
