Inoculating Cities

Inoculating Cities: Developing Tools for Urban Pandemic Preparedness is a collaboration between researchers in the faculties of the Built Environment and Population Health Sciences

The project team for Inoculating Cities: Developing Tools for Urban Pandemic Preparedness collaborated with the Centre for Global Health Science and Security on a statement (supplemented with statements by Chatham House, Resolve to Save Lives, the World Economic Forum, and World Health Organization) for the 2018 Global Parliament of Mayors (GPM) Annual Summit that contributed to the adoption of resolutions in the Bristol Declaration, where the mayors of the GPM committed to improving pandemic preparedness at local, national, and international levels. These efforts are targeted towards supporting the creation of an inter-city alliance centred around pandemic preparedness that can encourage the sharing of experiences and best practices. Furthermore, we disseminated a white paper titled 'A research agenda for urban pandemic preparedness: a call to action' to attendees of the Global Health Security Conference in June 2019.

This enabled new links to be forged with specialists working within global health security, paving the way for new opportunities to be devised that will ensure appropriate actions and outputs are developed that target urban pandemic preparedness.

This project has fostered relationships with academic institutions, policy makers and experts operating within the pandemic preparedness ecosystem. This will streamline future collaborations and projects within this critical space to ensure far-reaching and sustainable activities.

The results of this project informed the development of the Childhood Infection and Pollution (CHIP) project. Specifically, the inter city-alliance and municipal to national linkages outlined in the white paper are being adapted to guide policy initiatives designed to scale-up interventions developed in slums. Additionally, these activities strengthened alliances with our collaborators in Georgetown, who are currently acting as co-investigators on the CHIP project.